the short versionOklahoma's junior Senator Tom Coburn made an appearance at the Sand Springs Triangle for the local Chamber of Commerce. He spoke to the crowd on the issues that the government is tackling right now and took some questions. The Sand Springs mayor gave him the key to the city. God save the Sandites now...
the long version[
The following is my second attempt at gonzo journalism. When I sat down to write up my recap of the Coburn event, I couldn't see any hep way to cover other than straight forward personal experience and opinion. I haven't copy edited this piece; I guess that makes it part gonzo, part spontaneous prose. If you think it's worth editing, comment and I'll clean it up. Enjoy.]Police officers and old people. Chris and I stuck out like sore thumbs freshly smacked with hammers. Nevertheless, we are constituents and the good Senator Dr. Tom Coburn shook our hands and moved along to the more right-thinking elderly citizens to our left.
I kept thinking to my self as he walked down the stairs of what used to be the Charles Page Memorial Library, "I've never met a U.S. Senator before." I once met a man I thought would become a senator, but that seems like a long time ago, and it wasn't meant to be.
Has it already been 8 months? 9? Putting on my Carson shirt, it seems like it was last weekend that I was out knocking on doors, trying to get the right man in office. I act surprised by the passage of time, but then I realize how much has changed since then. How much I've changed. Election night 2004 changed me. Looking back at who I was before and who I am after, I know that something died that night in me: that optimism, that feeling that what I was doing mattered, that I was making a difference. I felt that way all day on November 2, 2005. For 12 straight hours, I walked Ottawa County door to door with the flu to squeeze every last vote out for my guy and it took ABC News about 20 minutes bring my hopes crashing to the floor. Peter Jennings reported that they were calling Tom Coburn the winner in Oklahoma, with 2% of precincts reporting. I was in the TV studio by then propped up in a chair, trying to man a camera and stay awake. The retiring Oklahoma Rep. Larry Roberts almost convinced me that Jennings and the ABC guys were wrong, and I thank him to this day for it. But Tom Coburn, the crazy doctor from Muskogee, the man who only became a U.S. Representative from District 2 because a Republican patsy won the Democratic primary in 1994, had become the junior senator from Oklahoma.
Now he stood before me and a gaggle of my fellow Sandites, waiting for the head of the Chamber of Commerce to finish a short biographical introduction, so he could address us. The Chamber of Commerce guy started by telling the crowd that he understood why the crowd had chosen to sit in the shade and that's why they had scrapped the idea of holding the event on the platform a few yards away. I dare say Chris and I had more to do with it than the weather, though, as we were the first to arrive with chairs and I'll be damned if I'll sit in the sun and listen to this breed of swine.
After mild applause for his marriage and his desire to maintain his medical practice while in office, Coburn began, naturally, by linking the terrorist bombings in London to the need for U.S. resolve in Iraq. "London is a good example of why we cannot lose in Iraq," Coburn said, tying an a coordinated attack coordinated by an Al-Qaida off-shoot to a military operation thousands of miles away and far from the point of the war on terror. Listening to that took me back to the spring of 2003, when Bin Laden and Hussein were best buds and WMDs were still the main threat Iraq posed. You know, the good ol' days.
When he finished spreading fear through the crowd with terror talk, he moved immediately to an issue that happens to be in his wheelhouse in these parts: Supreme Court justices. This was the subject that the good Christian folk of Sand Springs had come out to hear about. Sen. Coburn set the stage for a battle, a "battle of ideals." If the crowd had been larger than 35 people, they would have been in a frenzy. Imagine the Beatles on Sullivan, only instead of cute, mop-topped Brits, you've got bug-eyed Tom Coburn, instead of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," you've got a commitment to amend the Constitution to stop filibusters, and instead of hysterical girls, you've got over-weight, bored retirees clapping that their man is in office. That gives you a pretty accurate portrait of the scene. The crowd was especially roused when Coburn spoke of how the opposition party cannot stop the "truth" from prevailing. The aging housewives were enthralled; I was less impressed. His "truth" is ideology. Just as mine is ideology. Dealing in absolutes, like good and evil just makes the ideology easier for church-goers to swallow.
I did directly agree with the senator at least once during the day. When he said the recent Supreme Court ruling in the Ohio eminent domain case was a horrendous decision, I was feeling it. I actually felt like clapping at that condemnation, and did. My attitude soon soured though when he turned his attention to medical issues. He blasted Medicare, Medicaid, and private practices, proclaiming each "broken." He offered no true solutions, like no one else in his party can. He also offered no apology for helping to break it. When he mentioned that Medicare is bankrupt, he didn't mention it was this year's budget that broke it, cutting 30 billion dollars from its budget. It's not like Tom Coburn or any other Republican is actually worried about fixing this service which helps our seniors get the medical treatment they need. It's always been their plan to rack up a bill big enough that the government has to cut the funding for the "socialist programs" in order to pay everything else off. Iraq and the War on Terror gave them a pretty big bill to funnel money to, and the seniors in the terror-targeted nursing homes across our country are better off for it.
Instead of actually offering solutions to fix ailing Medicare and Medicaid, Coburn claimed prevention is the way to get the costs down. He gave the example that over 80% of diabetes cases are preventable. He said if only our Surgeon General, a bureaucrat, were more visible and active in public education, we'd know not to feed our kids some much damned sugar, saving the nation millions of dollars in treatment later. I don't think it would totally solve the problem, but prevention is a good idea. I can't fault his logic, entirely, but I'm sure the candy and cereal lobbyists might be able to.
A good friend of mine likes to call the Republican Party the "Party of Life...Until your born, then you're on your own." Sen. Tom Coburn is a perfect example of this philosophy. He wants anti-choice justices on the bench and doesn't care if there's a safety net in place for young children or not. Case in point, if you're a child in Oklahoma, there's a 1 in 3 chance that you haven't been properly immunized, and if you're one of the 150,000 kids here who's living without health insurance, there's a slim chance you'll see a doctor for preventative care. If Tom Coburn wants to preach about prevention, why doesn't he start by doing something that will keep our kids from getting sick in the first place, and getting sicker than they should have to when they do get sick.
Last year on the campaign trail, Brad Carson talked about the uninsured children of this state and his desire to make medical attention available to them. Tom Coburn campaigned on the "Christian persecution complex" platform: Anti-Abortion, Anti-Gay Rights, Pro-Ten Commandments, Anti-Liberalism. Helping people who are living and breathing and out of the womb was and is none of his concern.
I can sit here and type with all this fury, but as I sat on the Triangle, I only listened respectfully to the senator.
I know that might be shocking to some, disappointing to most, but I was somewhat awestruck, indeed, dumbstruck. Perhaps it was the senator's rhetorical skills. He took what seemed like centrist positions on most issues and took stands on issues it would be easiest for him to defend in front of his "homefield" fans. He didn't say anything that anyone could really attack and draw any blood.
The more likely cause for my lack of solid rebuttals to the doctor was the buildup. I've been waiting so long for a crack at this guy, and I'd built this image of a crazy fundamentalist who would say anything he felt like, leaving himself open for attacks. The Tom Coburn I saw Friday afternoon was not the guy who spouted off about Schindler's List corrupting young minds, though. He wasn't the guy who made conservatives scared of lesbians in high school bathrooms. He wasn't even the guy who said said he silicone breast implants are healthy. He was just another politician, talking to his constituents about the issues. He wasn't the nutty right-winger who'd ruined my day back in November. He was just another rich white guy voted into power.
I was disappointed. I'm still disappointed. I expected so much more from this guy. I ran myself ragged through the streets of Miami and Commerce with icy wind blasting me in the face, nose running, trying to defeat him, and here he was, just another guy. My disappointment almost matched that that I felt last November, slumped in that chair in the NEO studio.
The whole affair ended with our Sand Springs mayor giving Sen. Tom Coburn the key to our fair city. For what reason was never addressed. I guess a big time political player who would bother stopping off in Sand Springs deserves something, regardless of his particular accomplishments on our behalf. I couldn't help but give an uneasy sign and grimace as the plaque on which the key was mounted was handed over, for now Sen./Dr. Tom Coburn can enter this town whenever he likes and that, children, does not sit well with me at all.
