Tom Coburn in the Economist

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In this weeks Economist they've written up a really good piece on Tom Coburn, surpising on some aspects coming from the Economist, but not others.

"THERE are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net," muses the anti-hero in "Match Point", Woody Allen's best film in years. "And, for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win...or maybe it doesn't and you lose." Tom Coburn, the freshman senator from Oklahoma, could hardly be more unlike Mr Allen's tennis-playing rogue; he is a blunt-talking doctor who suffers from a surfeit of principles rather than a lack of them. But the metaphor of the tennis ball balanced delicately on the net perfectly captures his recent political career.

For some time it looked highly unlikely that Mr Coburn would win any points at all in the Senate. He is a maverick in an institution that puts a premium on conformity; a purist in an institution that puts a premium on compromise; and a straight-shooter on awkward subjects, such as sexually transmitted diseases, in an institution that puts a premium on politically correct platitudes. Above all, in a club where most members rather like the idea of using public money to buy public support and getting their name festooned on roads and sculpture parks, he spends much of his time attacking political pork.

Yet the past few months have transformed this pariah into a force to be reckoned with. Two things have tipped the doctor's ball over the net. The first is Hurricane Katrina, which gave him a chance to renew his attack on the $286 billion transport bill. How could Congress justify spending $24 billion on "earmarks" at a time of national emergency? (Earmarks, for the uninitiated, are spending projects that are directly requested by individual members of Congress and are not subject to competitive bidding.) And how could it justify spending $223m on a "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska when New Orleans was under water?

Mr Coburn did not stop the bridge, and he lost more friends. Ted Stevens, the senior senator for Alaska and the former chairman of the appropriations committee, implied that he had never been so insulted in his 37 years in Congress (which is a pity). But Mr Coburn won the argument: he turned "the bridge to nowhere" into a symbol of waste and corruption.

The second thing that has redeemed Mr Coburn is the Abramoff lobbying scandal. Lobbyists love earmarks: they are a way to smuggle pet projects into vast spending bills without even the pretence of proper oversight. It is no coincidence that the supersizing of the lobbying industry has coincided with the multiplication of earmarks. And it is no coincidence that the most egregious examples of lobbying corruption involve earmarks. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a former congressman from California, admitted taking $2.4m in bribes in exchange for earmarks. Mr Abramoff bragged that appropriations committees were "earmark favour factories".

Mr Coburn has been making his case against earmarks for a decade, but now he can command a national audience. He argues that earmarks make it impossible for politicians to prioritise: they explain why the New Orleans levees were allowed to crumble but money was appropriated for unnecessary bridges. They also encourage a culture of spending. Legislators vote for bloated spending bills—such as the prescription-drug benefit bill—in order to get their earmarks through and they also engage in cynical "I'll vote for your earmarks if you vote for mine" horsetrading. And he laments that earmarks are hopelessly addictive. The number of pork projects has increased by 970% in the past ten years. Mr Coburn has called for the elimination of earmarking to be the centrepiece of any post-Abramoff reforms in Congress, and pledged to force his colleagues to justify their earmarks on the floor of the Senate.
The deliverer of bad tidings

There are all sorts of reasons why he might fail. The establishment will surely hit back hard, and the good doctor offers plenty of targets. He is on record worrying about "rampant" lesbianism in Oklahoma schools, supporting the death penalty for abortionists and claiming that the gay agenda "is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today". He made lots of enemies in his six years in the House. Fellow Republicans have called him a "burr under the saddle of the party"; Dennis Hastert, the House Speaker, publicly predicted that Mr Coburn would lose his Senate race.

But Mr Coburn is no longer quite so isolated. The rumble of discontent with pork-barrel spending has won him support from across the political spectrum, from big-government liberals as well as anti-government conservatives. In this battle, powerful Republicans such as Sam Brownback and John McCain are on his side. Jeff Flake, a congressman from Arizona, wants to subject all earmarks to debate and amendment. It is a measure of how far the anti-pork campaign has got that John Boehner, a candidate for the House leadership and an establishment man if ever there was one, recently penned an article for the Wall Street Journal calling for a "lower-pork diet".

And Mr Coburn's singular personality in this instance may help. Put simply, it is hard to see him being bought off. It is not just that he regards the fact that he has survived two bouts of cancer as proof that God has special work for him; he has no intention of becoming a career politician. He wants to return to his preferred profession of medicine once he has served two terms. He delivered 400 babies while in the House and would still spend his weekends pulling them out if the Senate Ethics Committee hadn't decided that the profession of delivering babies was incompatible with the profession of kissing them.

In 1999, Mr Coburn brought the House to a virtual standstill by threatening to attach 130 amendments to a bloated agriculture bill. Let us hope that he will earn an even worse reputation in the Senate.