This Town (10 page)

As a physician who has treated drug addicts, Coburn compares the craving for power to dependence on morphine. Like morphine, power “dulls the senses, impairs judgment,” and leads politicians to make choices destructive to their characters and our democracy. Like Las Vegas, Washington is a city that leads people to behave in exaggerated versions of who they really are, Coburn included, which he would characterize this way: “I’m sort of a grumpy old grapefruit,” he says.

Another favorite Coburn invocation is what C. S. Lewis called the “Inner Ring.” In his essay of that name, the Irish-born writer describes the human craving to be part of an elite circle, or Inner Ring. Coburn applies the notion to Washington. Politicians become obsessed with the Inner Ring, the place where decisions are made, where one is privy to the information that allows them to be “in the know.” Some are inside the ring, others are outside. “
The sensation of stepping inside the Inner Ring of Congress is exhilarating,” Coburn wrote in
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders into Insiders
(coauthored by John Hart). Washington today affords a broadened and democratized Inner Ring. One needn’t be an elected official, or hotshot lobbyist, or TV pundit to be, or feel, “in the know,” to achieve do-it-from-home insider status.

In an interview in his office, I asked Reid what he really thought of Tom Coburn. He paused for several seconds, and I imagined a little self-editing gerbil inside his skull hurling itself in the unimpeded pathway that typically connects his brain directly to his mouth. A look of slight agony fell over Reid’s sober countenance, the look of someone whose self-editing gerbil is not well-trained.

“Here’s what I think of Tom Coburn,” Reid said finally, and then there was another long pause. “I am going to have to go off the record for this, otherwise you won’t get a good idea of what I think of him.” This was Reid being cordial to Tom Coburn.

A few weeks later, Reid and Coburn had another cordial exchange, this one over FAA funding legislation. Coburn wanted to block an attached bill that would have provided funds for squirrel sanctuaries. Reid in turn called Coburn a “dictator” in a floor speech. (In an irresistible postscript, a bipartisan group of Senate aides were discussing the “dictator” remark the next day, when they were overheard by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, a devout Mormon and one of Washington’s kings of unintentional comedy. “Wait a minute, he called Tom a dickhead?” said Hatch. “That is outrageous.”)

Coburn is as devout a fiscal conservative and small-government hawk as there is in the Senate. But he would more readily identify with “antiestablishment” than “antigovernment,” the government being just part of what he calls the city’s pervasive illness, or “permanent feudal class.” Coburn was viscerally anti-Washington before that sentiment coalesced into the Tea Party. He might in fact be the “
spiritual godfather” of the movement (
Newsweek
declared him as much). Reid, for his part, referred to members of the Tea Party as “evil-mongers.”

Coburn was a blister on the leadership of both chambers, or sometimes something more dangerous. (In the House, he participated in two coups against Newt Gingrich, the second one successful.)

After Trent Lott became Senate majority leader in 1996, Coburn recalls talking to Lott about a government reform initiative; Lott shot him down by saying that there would be plenty of time for “good government” after Election Day. “I’m an order kind of guy,” Coburn quotes Lott. “Trent was essentially saying that staying in office was more important to him than anything else. It was amazing to me that he would actually say that.”

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T
rent Lott was born in a rural hospital in north-central Mississippi, the only child from a miserable union of financially stressed parents. “My daddy liked whiskey and women, and that was very traumatic for me,” Lott told me in 2009, shortly after Obama took over, the economy had cratered, and Lott was ensconced in his lavish lobbying office on M Street.

Like many political figures, Lott honed his powers of charm and persuasion in dicey childhood circumstances. “When I was Senate leader and Bill Clinton was president and Newt Gingrich was speaker,” he pointed out to me, “we were three southern boys that come from dysfunctional families.” Lott is a stickler for neatness and order, loath to allow the different foods on his plate to touch. Every surface of his life is arranged just so, beginning with his luscious helmet of senatorial hair. He is a devout creature of routine, waking just after six, drinking three cups of Maxwell House, reading in his pajamas, and spraying his hair into perfect form. Upon arriving back home after work, Lott must—within seconds of walking through the front door—take off his clothes and put on his pajamas.

In 2008, Lott started a boutique lobbying firm with a former Senate colleague, John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat who as a member of the House once memorably declared that
his vote could not be bought but “could be rented.” After a member of the House leadership called him a “cheap whore,” Breaux protested, saying he was “not cheap.”

If Reid is the inside orchestrator of the Senate and Coburn the Tea Party godfather, Trent Lott is another This Town archetype of the age—a “former.” His career path had surprised no one. Nearly all of the most recent Senate leaders (Lott, Daschle, Bob Dole, George Mitchell) have stayed in or close to town after they left office, as have most former Speakers of the House and majority leaders (Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, Richard Gephardt, Tom DeLay, Dick Armey). Daschle and Lott identify each other as among their closest post-Senate friends. They appear on the Sunday shows together, “advise” clients, sit on boards, and dine with their wives at the Four Seasons in Georgetown. I had a phone conversation with Lott shortly after he left the Senate. I had called him for a story I was writing about his ailing former colleague Ted Kennedy—“Tiddy Kennedy,” Lott called him. Lott kept gushing over the sanity of his new life.

His tone shifted when I mentioned that Kennedy had kept a letter from Lott hanging in his Senate conference room. It was a thank-you note Lott had sent to Kennedy after Kennedy had purchased a painting for Lott on Cape Cod. “Really?” Lott said quietly. “Did Tiddy really keep that hanging up? I had no idea.” There was a pause on the line, and it occurred to me that Lott was choking up.

Ted Kennedy died, expectedly, in August 2009. Large swaths of This Town, including about half the Senate, convened for the funeral at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston. This was one of those This Town field trips where the most usual of suspects convene in a satellite sanctuary—Chuck Schumer, Walter Isaacson, Tom Brokaw, the Clintons, et al. Even John Edwards showed up, on furlough from his perpetual doghouse and trailing several feet behind his cancer-stricken and cuckolded wife, Elizabeth. It was Edwards’s first emergence in a while. He drew numerous “What’s that asshole doing here?” stares and planted himself in a prime spot near the center aisle. (In a stroke of justice, a seat in front of Edwards was taken, at the last second, by Bill Russell, the six-foot-nine-inch Boston Celtics great.)

Lott couldn’t make the trip, but he sent regards. He assured me, in an interview a few weeks later, that he would never forget Tiddy Kennedy.

Sitting in his swank lobbying office, Lott seemed well satisfied that he himself had not been forgotten. He mentioned to me that Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware, calls him on his birthday every year. “October the ninth, phone rings, like clockwork, it’s Tom Carper,” Lott says. “Why would he bother? I’m gone, I’m retired. I can’t do anything for him—nothing. But he calls. It’s nice.”

Lott collects these expressions like snow globes. “The gestures really do matter to Trent,” said Daschle, whom Lott—in a nice gesture of his own—called after Daschle was forced to withdraw his nomination as Obama’s secretary of health and human services over his failure to pay taxes on a personal driver and another income. “There is so much artificiality in politics, so much phoniness,” Daschle says. “On the surface, you can say these phone calls and notes are bull, politicians acting like politicians. But many political figures are very insecure people.” Part of this, Daschle says, is that Washington is such a delicate place that anything lending the illusion of a permanent bond can be meaningful. “Even the most powerful people need to hear those attaboys,” Daschle says. “They need to know that they’re not forgotten.”

Lott told me he had recently received a phone call from Herb Kohl, the Democratic senator from Wisconsin, who served for many years with Lott. But Kohl, an enigmatic outlier, had almost no relationship with Lott. Yet there was Kohl on the phone, just to tell Lott that he missed him. “That’s so nice of you, Herb,” said Lott. He said it was one of the nicest gestures anyone’s made to him in a long time, and he has told the Herb Kohl story several times.

Lott represents a wedge between distinct Washington models waging battle in the Obama era. Detractors, like Coburn, view Lott as an emblematic former, an entrenched and well-heeled installation of the “permanent feudal class.” Harry Reid loves Lott: he views him as just the deal-maker pragmatist today’s Senate craves. “I miss Trent Lott,” Reid is always saying, which for Reid also doubles as a backhanded whack at Lott’s Republican leadership successors (Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell) but which Lott still appreciates, of course.

Lott is a neo‒Washington celebrity. His presence is desired at parties, on boards, and on annual duck-hunting trips on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with a bipartisan boy’s brigade that can include Terry McAuliffe and Dick Cheney and the Democratic mega-lobbyist Tommy Boggs and the journalist Tucker Carlson (until recently, they convened at a place owned by Boggs called Tobacco Stick Lodge).

Lott reads about himself in Politico, hears that someone saw him shopping for ties at Brooks Brothers, and tweeted about it, whatever “tweet” means. He gets invited onto the Sunday shows and hosts fund-raisers. His brand has proven durable. He is regularly seen eating lunch in the cafeteria of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

He always has lunch. He is making seven figures a year, easy. He is, once again, a big man in This Town.

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I
n October 2009, as the health-care bill was heading to the Senate floor, I visited Coburn at his home in Muskogee, Oklahoma, about an hour southeast of Tulsa. Armadillos keep trying to tear up his lawn. He keeps pulling fat water moccasins out of his swimming pool. “I kill them,” Coburn said with relish, “by slicing their heads off with the sharp edge of a shovel.”

He planned to do the same to the health-care bill. Enacting the legislation would be catastrophic, Coburn said, and he was determined to gum up the process. “My mission is to frame this health-care debate in terms of the fiscal ruin of this country,” said Coburn, who had a few days earlier railed on the Senate floor that the federal debt was “
waterboarding” his five grandchildren.

As he stood in the driveway of his seven-acre estate, Coburn kept looking back on the ground behind him, distracted. One of his two dogs, the skinnier one, Beau, had a terrible case of eczema on his belly. Beau kept rolling onto his back, exposing a raw, hairless patch of the afflicted area. He kept whimpering, begging for scratches, until Coburn finally obliged. The dog squeaked with delight and the senator wheeled around with a point to make.

“See, that’s like what the average politician’s like. They all need to have their bellies scratched. It’s all about the strokes.”

Before I left Coburn’s house, the senator described for me the Zen state he could achieve when mowing his lawn. Coburn then invited me to take a spin on his prized John Deere tractor, which I did, and it did not end well—that’s to say, in a collision with the side of the senator’s barn. (There is obviously a larger lesson to draw here about city Jews not being meant for tractors, but that would be stereotyping, which we should never do.)

Back in his Senate office, Coburn became most animated on the subject of political psychology. His next book, he says, will be on the power of “anxiety, worry, and fear” in Washington. These emotions lead politicians to cling to the safest, most conventional methods of staying in power. In contemporary Washington, he says, the easiest way to remain in office is to embrace rigid partisanship. This, he says, “usually signals a deeper faith in careerism than in conservatism or liberalism.”

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C
oburn’s Senate career has evolved in a more mainstream direction in recent years. He is no less of a pest, or nemesis, to Harry Reid, but much less of an outlier in a Republican caucus that now includes many of the younger Tea Party bomb-throwers who viewed him as an iconoclastic role model. Coburn’s iconoclasm today is often defined by his willingness to compromise and work with Democrats. He was hailed in a 2012
60 Minutes
piece as “
one of the most influential and conservative members of the Senate,” and one of the few members of either party willing to work with the other side. Reid loyalists hated this story, which elicited this tweet from Jim Manley: “Reporters out there that take Coburn seriously (I am talking about you steve kroft/60 minutes) are morons.” Tom Coburn’s biggest crime against Republican fealty is his friendship with Obama. They hit it off at an orientation for new senators in 2005, and so did Michelle Obama and Coburn’s wife, Carolyn, a former Miss Oklahoma. When Obama moved into the White House, Coburn sent him weekly scripture passages; he visits the president periodically and describes him as a wonderful man. He calls the White House to buck up Obama during rough times, or with congratulations when the president is triumphant—a genuine gesture, Coburn says, as opposed to the false ones that This Town runs on.

“He always hugs me after we have our meetings,” Coburn says of Obama, sounding a little more enriched by such a gesture than I would have expected.

I asked Coburn if he knew Tim Russert, who I suggested had been the leader of The Club, or Washington’s Inner Ring. Not well, Coburn said. But he said he liked Tim. “I always got the sense that Tim opened the window and let you see Tim Russert. No false guile. It’s a lot more fun dealing with someone when you don’t feel you’re being gamed.”