Doctor's Order
Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn Is Back On Capitol Hill, Budgetary Scalpel at the Ready
By Hanna Rosin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 12, 2004; Page D01
"There comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back."
-- Willie Stark,
from Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men"
Tom Coburn has been here before, he can do this. During the four-day orientation for new senators, he can play the good student, sit through lectures by his soon-to-be colleagues on what they think is important, Washington words like "bipartisanship" and "ethics rules," be instructed like a third-grader on how to make friends with the other team.
When the "Marvelous Seven" new Republican senators are introduced to the media, reporters ignore the others and swarm around Coburn like bees to soda pop, waiting for him to fizz. But he is prepared. Dr. Coburn, what about partial birth abortion? they ask the senator-elect from Oklahoma. Dr. Coburn, what about gay marriage? What about values, Dr. Coburn?
But he resists unleashing one of his prophetic warnings from the campaign about "rampant lesbianism" or abortion doctors getting the death penalty or the venality of your average Washington politician. Instead, he says he'll be cautious, observant, collegial: "I promise you I'll be sleeping every night with that rule book," he says, meaning "Riddick's Senate Procedure," a 1,500-page manual.
"Dr. Coburn, how long do you think you can keep that up?" one exasperated reporter finally asks.
The answer is, about as long as it takes to get back to Muskogee, back to his homey closet of a doctor's office, to his reclining mahogany chair, to his mug of tea and pictures of his grandchildren and framed fragments of Scripture and all the quiet comforts that let him hear his own voice again.
The rules they learned in the orientation session on ethics? "Ridiculous," he says. "Crazy." He can fly his wife home from Washington with frequent-flier miles, but not to Washington. He can dine with a lobbyist, but only once. "Just think about it," he says. "I'm 56 years of age. I've had three jobs, raised three kids. If somebody can buy my vote for a dinner, I shouldn't be here in the first place.
"I'm just going to ignore all that and do what I think is ethically right and aboveboard. And I suspect that's what everyone else does, too."
Ahhh. Tom Coburn is really back. You can hear the collective sigh of relief from those political junkies who have been secretly dreading four more years of the same dull party discipline.
On election night, while most of us hung on Ohio, Joe Scarborough watched as Coburn's lead against Democrat Brad Carson grew by one point, then five, then 12. Suddenly, the former congressman, now host of his own MSNBC show, felt that old thrill run through him.
"Good God," he recalls thinking. "May God help the leadership of the Republican Senate. I just can't imagine. I can't imagine how much fun it's going to be to watch Tom Coburn go after his own."
Like Coburn, Scarborough was one of the House rebels from the freshman class of 1994 who shut down the government over a spending bill and led the coup against House Speaker Newt Gingrich. But none of them were ever really like Coburn. Most got star-struck, addicted to politics. They ignored their term-limit pledges and stayed. A couple became lobbyists. But after serving three terms, Coburn went back to Oklahoma, back to being a family doctor, just as he said he would.
"Tom is in a league to himself," says Scarborough. "Unlike a lot of people, he really believes what he says."
When Coburn says he's against "pork barrel spending," that means he refused $15 million in funds for his own state and publicly shamed the legislator who had "bribed" him with it. When he says he's against "career politicians," that means he has written a tell-all book, "Breach of Trust," saying, for example, that some offhand comment of Sen. Trent Lott's "made me sick."
It means his best friend is a soybean farmer who learned the other meaning of "blackberry" only this summer. It means he can count his allies in the political world on two hands. It means that a month before the race, his colleagues in Washington were so dreading his return that House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) publicly predicted Coburn would lose.
In the left-wing blogosphere, Coburn is just House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) in a doctor's lab coat. Coburn says, "I favor the death penalty for abortionists." He said during the campaign that the "battle for our culture is a battle between good and evil." He told a meeting of local Republicans that "the gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power. They are the greatest threat, that agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today."
But those who know him best see him as the antithesis of DeLay: a man disgusted by party building and political favoritism and redistricting. In his book Coburn quotes C.S. Lewis and "The Lord of the Rings" on the seductive dangers of the precious jewel. It's like "morphine," he writes. "It dulls the senses, impairs judgments. . . . Just as drug addicts sometimes stop at nothing to obtain their drug, politicians will often stop at nothing to gain access to more power."
Some might wonder why, after six maddening years in the House, he would return to this den of iniquity. But for those who know him well, this is no mystery.
"If you are Jeremiah, the prophet of doom," says a political observer who knows him well, "this is the place you go to condemn."
'Still Inner Voice'
He never wanted to return to Washington, he says, still doesn't in many ways. But when he told everyone that, he just couldn't sleep. It was the last Saturday night in February, and he'd just gone to dinner with Rep. Steve Largent, another one of the House rebels from Oklahoma and one of Coburn's few close political friends. He told Largent he'd decided not to run for the Senate, that he'd already drafted the announcement and planned to release it that Monday. Largent e-mailed Kirk Humphreys, the other Republican in the race. "Good news, Kirk," he wrote. "Coburn's not running."
Coburn called his mother that night, too. "Mother, I'm not going to run for Senate," she recalls him saying. "But people just won't leave me alone." Coburn had recently been through chemotherapy for colon cancer and he was feeling weak.
"I said, 'If you're supposed to be a U.S. senator, you will. Put it in the Lord's hands and leave it there,' " Joy Herrell recalls (she remarried after Coburn's father died). "But he just had an awful feeling."
He went to bed but just lay awake. What plagued him, he says, was "an impression in my spiritual life that I was supposed to do this."
"Financially, it's terrible. For my family, it's terrible. And politically, it's stupid to get into a race six to nine months after everyone's already into it. But it's kind of been one of those things that's marked my life. I learned to be obedient to that still inner voice. There are pauses in all of our spirits where we get checked. Whether it's just an impression or God really speaking to you, I don't know, but you get a sense that this is where you're supposed to go. And when you listen there's a settledness."
At 6 a.m. Monday he called his mother again to tell her he'd changed his mind
He tells this story matter-of-factly, with no hush or strangeness or booming prophecy in his voice. He tells it like a man familiar with the miraculous dimension in ordinary life. What did he hear that night? What did the inner voice say that lead him away from his beautiful home in western Muskogee, from his wife and daughters and grandchildren and all the patients who need him? What could have possibly led him back to the hungry lions?
"He believes it was a calling," says Jan Pearson, wife of his friend Charles, the farmer. "He just felt that's what God wanted him to do."
Coburn and his wife worship at the nondenominational New Community Church just off Shawnee Bypass on the east side of town. They just got a new building, but that's not important. Nor is the pastor important, the congregants will tell you. What matters is every individual's personal relationship with Jesus Christ. "Jesus is real. He's alive," Pastor Tim Salters will preach. "Get to know him more and more."
Listen closely, watch for the signs, obey. This is how you will discover your true purpose, why you were put on this Earth. It may come to you at breakfast or while talking to a friend. You may discover you are called as a missionary to Africa, a teacher for the blind. You may still be looking for signs.
Coburn's friends will point to the cancer, his second bout with the disease. Once again, he was ill, once again he survived. "He looks at this and thinks, 'Who would have thought I'd be here?' " says Cole. "I've beaten cancer twice. God must want me to be here. God must have chosen me to do something."
He will say that, too, if he's pushed. But mostly he saw the signs in the newspaper every day. A federal court strikes down a ban on "partial birth abortion." Gay weddings in San Francisco. A bloated spending bill lands on President Bush's desk and he leaves his veto pen in the drawer. And Coburn's growing feeling that he alone sees what's happening.
"Look, I got my finger in the dike," says Coburn, describing his role in the new Senate, and he could be talking about any number of things -- Medicare, Social Security, the deficit, the health care system, sexually transmitted diseases, traditional marriage, the future of your children and grandchildren.
Four years had gone by since he left Washington and Coburn was still seeing teenagers come into his office who had dozens of sexual partners and one or another venereal disease. Four years had gone by and legislators were behaving exactly the way they did before, passing budgets stuffed with pork and bragging about how "tight" they'd been.
"My goal is not to make anyone look bad," he says. "My goal is to convince people we're saving the next generation's economic freedom. I think the vast majority of people see that. They just don't see the alarm bells going off, as I do."
Bush might do the right thing -- stem the moral drift, cut the deficit -- but his mind is "cluttered" by advisers whispering to him, Coburn says. This is what he discovers, over and over. This is what brought him to Washington, and what brings him back: Leaders will fail you, in business, in church, in politics. Eventually they will succumb to the lure of power, they are "cowards," "selfish," he writes in his book. They are, in his famous term for the Oklahoma City establishment, "crapheads." They don't see what he sees.
'A Fine Christian'
When he is listening, Coburn stares so intently he seems not to blink behind those wireless frames. He is not at all brusque, but doesn't chitchat or joke much.
Most days Coburn starts out at 6 a.m. doing rounds at the Muskogee Regional Hospital Center. Then he heads down the street to see patients at his family practice, which specializes in obstetrics. By 9 p.m. he's home for dinner. When he first got to Congress in 1994, he called Charles Pearson to say he was bored. "There's nothing to do up here," Pearson recalls him saying. "I think I'll find a clinic to work at."
"He could be a little rebellious," his mother says, recalling his boyhood. "But I tell you what: He's a fine Christian."
He was the third child born to O.W. and Joy Coburn. As a boy he had the spirit of a third-born child but the superego of a first. "He always had something exciting going on," she recalls. That something usually led to broken arms or legs. Once, he persuaded his older brothers to jump off the garage roof, using a towel as a parachute. Because of his penchant for mischief, his uncle nicknamed him "Stinkweed."
But he was no rebel. She remembers when Tom was in the fourth grade and another mother came to the house and told her that one of the boys had been up to no good in the playground that day. It was Tom who stood up in class and told the teacher "what that boy did was not the Christian thing to do," his mother recalls.
In the fifth grade he changed a grade on his report card before he gave it to his mother to sign. All of a sudden she heard footsteps running back to her. "Mother, I have to tell you something," she recalls him saying. "I changed my grade."
"You're going to have to ask God to forgive you," she told him.
"I know it. I already talked to God about it."
His father was then struggling to start a company that manufactured equipment to process optical lenses. He paid his sons a quarter an hour to sort five-gallon buckets of bolts, nuts and washers in the garage. By the time they were in high school, Coburn Optical was the biggest employer in Muskogee, and all the boys and their younger sister had their own cars.
His father was driven and serious. Jim says he was also an alcoholic, not a "mean drunk, but we would see him stumble home and mother would carry him away to the bedroom." From that, his friends and family guess, Coburn developed his enormous self-discipline.
His friends say he likes a good cigar and a drink. But just one cigar, two drinks.
After his junior year at Oklahoma State University, Coburn married the woman his mother says he'd been in love with they were in kindergarten together: Carolyn Denton, Miss Oklahoma 1967. She had accounted for his one bit of true outlaw behavior -- a fistfight at a hot dog stand with another boy who'd asked her out. The wedding took place in the summer of '68, and by the next summer they moved to Virginia, just outside Richmond, so he could help his father get a new business off the ground.
"I was focused on business, kind of driven. I was sort of aloof from the counterculture. I never even heard of marijuana," he says. Coburn proved to be a spectacular businessman. He took over the lens division and grew it in just under a decade from about $100,000 in sales to $40 million to $50 million. When a strike broke out, he quashed it. When a Japanese competitor threatened, he proposed an overhaul that seemed financially reckless to everyone at the time, but that ended up saving the company.
In 1975 Revlon bought the company. Coburn quickly got bored shuttling back and forth to headquarters in New York and dealing with new managers who he says "didn't know what they were talking about."
When he came home from Christmas that year, his mother, who volunteered at a hospital, noticed that a mole on his face had turned gray. Soon afterward a doctor diagnosed it as melanoma and told him he had a 20 percent chance of surviving more than a year.
Coburn left the office and "drove around aimlessly," he writes in his book. He thought about his wife, his three young daughters. He thought: "Why am I here? What am I doing here? If there's a limited amount of time what am I doing with it?"
At 30, when the scare had passed, Coburn left Virginia to get his medical degree at the University of Oklahoma and then returned to Muskogee to open Maternal and Family Practice Associates. Since then, he has been living the life of a country doctor. He and three partners see hundreds of patients, have delivered thousands of babies. Then one day he heard the calling.
In 1994 he read an article in the Muskogee Phoenix quoting Rep. Mike Synar, a Democrat, musing about nationalizing health care. "Somebody's got to run against this guy," he thought. At that point, his daughters had all moved out. One lives in town with her family, another lives with her husband in Los Angeles, his youngest is a singer with the Metropolitan Opera and lives in New York.
"Tommy, no, absolutely no," his wife said, according to his book. She told him he was too "direct and too bullheaded" to be a good politician, that he wouldn't get along in the world of politics.
One night he was at the Pearsons' house for dinner. The women were cleaning up when the men said they were going for a drive. Well into the night the women peered out and saw them sitting in the truck, talking.
"What do you think they're talking about?" Jan Pearson asked Carolyn Coburn.
"He's probably telling Charles he wants to run for Congress."
"Isn't that crazy?" Jan asked
"Yes. But he's serious."
Charles Pearson says Coburn talked about Washington with no love, really, "just the place where he worked." But Coburn is "his best friend, closer than a brother," so he can see that Coburn was getting restless as just a country doctor again.
"He likes the politics, I'll tell you that," he says, and compares Coburn to Hollywood stars who complain about too much fame. "The adrenaline flow, being in the know. He's had a taste of it and he likes it."
'Love Them, Not Judge Them'
Outside Oklahoma, Coburn is notorious for his apocalyptic pronouncements about filth on television, homosexuality, corrupt politicians. It's never clear if he just can't help himself or he does it on purpose. "It's like he was crazy in the right direction," says a frustrated ally of Carson, his recent opponent.
Take the "rampant lesbianism" quote. Here is the context: At a town hall meeting in Hugo, Okla., on Aug. 31, Coburn said that a campaign worker had told him that "lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How has that happened to us?"
Now, Coburn is defensive and says "rampant" was not his word, that he was merely quoting what some school official had told his campaign worker. But he agreed with the school official. And in defending himself, he digs in deeper.
"To me the risk is, you know, for children," he says. "What are the influences on our children that direct them away from where you as a parent might want them to go?" He says he knows gay people, has had dinner with one or two. He has patients "who used to be gay and are not." His job is to "love them, not judge them," he says. They are sinners no different from him.
Then he wends his way to, well, hear him out: "Not long ago I watched a special on PBS about red-tailed hawks. It was a wonderful story about a red-tailed hawk that had landed in Central Park. And the point they made throughout was the importance of a mother and father to children and each one had distinct roles they played which made them capable of surviving. That is a great way, it's the intended way. It doesn't mean we can't do it another way. The question is not, is something terrible, but should we shoot for what's best?"
Coburn's grappling with sin and redemption have made for some interesting run-ins with Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is openly gay. In his first year in Congress Coburn voted against an amendment Frank had introduced to cut spending even though he agreed with it. Later, he went up to Frank and told him: "I voted against your amendment because I disapprove of you," Frank recalls in a version Coburn confirms. "But I was wrong, and I'm not going to do it again." ("I wasn't enormously cheered by his conversion," Frank reports.)
In a book talk last year at the Heritage Foundation, Coburn named Frank as one of the congressmen he most admired. "He is a liberal and he is willing to stand up for what he believes," he said. "The problem with our country is people are not willing to stand up for what they believe in; that's the great threat to this country right now."
The subject that truly obsesses Coburn, the one he comes back to over and over, is not homosexuality or abortion, but fiscal responsibility -- spending, the deficit, entitlements. To Coburn, fiscal issues are moral ones. "It is evil to spend your kids' money, spend away their future," he says about the ballooning deficit. "It is good to be frugal. This is good and evil, black and white. Stealing from your kids is wrong. I don't care who you are."
In his book, Coburn reserves his greatest contempt for Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), then chairman of the House Transportation Committee and a "grandmaster of pork." During his last year in Congress, Coburn nearly shut down the House by threatening to attach 130 amendments to an agriculture appropriations bill he thought was too larded up.
The headlines called the budget passed by Congress last month the stingiest in years on domestic spending. But Coburn views it as business as usual, stuffed with pet projects. "Everyone's tickled," he says. "But they just added 2,000 bucks to everyone's debt, not including Social Security. We're proud of that? We ought to be disgusted."
For the moment, however, Coburn's determined to hold his tongue and return to Washington humbly. He's seen Gingrich since the coup and "it went okay," he says. He now has a "good relationship with Trent Lott." During an orientation dinner he had a "wonderful time" with Democratic Sen.-elect Barack Obama (Ill.) and his wife. "He's going to be somebody I can work with," he says. "I'm just cautious," he says, during an interview in his medical office in Oklahoma. "I have a reputation in Washington that's not necessarily accurate and I don't want to inflame that anymore before people get to know me and know my heart."
But already there are irritations -- he looked for a townhouse, but nothing seemed to cost less than $800,000. The staff of the Ethics Committee has already hand-delivered to him a letter saying he can't practice medicine while serving in the Senate. His own staff expects a showdown. But no matter, Coburn has bills to introduce, a country to save. "My goal in the Senate is I need to get done what I need to get done. And initially that means no confrontation."
Initially.
A plaque in his cozy medical office reads, "Make No Small Plans Here." Another reads, "Keep your eyes on Jesus." On the phone is a parliamentary leader from Albania whom Coburn helped with starting a prayer group. A former congressman just left a message. In the front hall, several patients are waiting. It's 9 a.m. and Coburn's already behind. His pager buzzes. He puts on his doctor's coat and he's off.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company |
