Senator Tom Coburn is throwing in the towel on his political career in Washington, and we are all the worse for it, both because he is a really solid man and one of the rare public officials who have the convictions and temperament to begin to change the conditions that are driving him back to private life in Oklahoma. In a recent interview, Coburn said this: “I think my biggest failing in the Senate is my inability to communicate effectively to change people’s minds. I’m bringing them the facts.” Therein lies the problem–many of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle don’t want to be confused by facts.
I was struck also by a review of a book by Lewis Lehrman, Money, Gold, and History, in which he engages the debate over the effectiveness of the gold standard over the years. I happen to be a fan of a gold-indexed currency, but the point is that the reviewer, David Beckworth, an economist, cuts to the real core of the problem when he says that the key issue is not the standard, but whether or not there will ever again be enough political support for any standard that demands discipline to a sound currency monetary regime. Again, facts get in the way.
Then we have the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s declaration of “war on poverty”, the centerpiece of The Great Society, a collection of programs about which National Review commented as follows: “The main beneficiaries of the war on poverty have not been and will not be the poor–the beneficiaries are the alleged poverty warriors themselves. The result: a large and expensive welfare state that provides very little welfare, a destructive and ruinous war that has not done much to reduce poverty. It gives the poor some material succor, but leaves the root causes alone–at best.” More facts.
It occurred to me that President Obama’s State of the Union message cut across all of these currents, and, in addition to the confusion, delusion, self-congratulation, and denial of the facts he can’t seem to accept, I could only think of how out of touch he is with the American people and how little he really understands who we are. He simply has neither the conviction nor the temperament to have a clue as to how to get us out of this mess.
Later in the interview, Tom Coburn said this: “I don’t think you fix this place until you have a convention of the states…..only America can change Washington”. When do we start?
