Our Okie from Muskogee

Muskogee, Okla. Soon after Republican senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma announced his retirement last fall, Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth placed a phone call to a doctor’s office in Muskogee. He reached Tom Coburn, a 5 6-year-old family practitioner. “You should run for the Senate,” said Moore. But Coburn wasn’t interested. He had just survived a bout with colon cancer, and said he had not enjoyed Washington all that much the first time around, when he was a three-term congressman in the 1990s. He preferred delivering babies in the maternity ward to kissing them on the campaign trail.

Then his health improved. He went skiing in December. The phone continued ringing and letters jammed his mailbox. A “Draft Coburn” website appeared on the Internet. Even though the kingpins of the state GOP had anointed Kirk Humphreys as Nickles’s successor, polls showed the former mayor of Oklahoma City struggling against the likely Democratic nominee, Rep. Brad Carson.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

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Muskogee, Okla. Soon after Republican senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma announced his retirement last fall, Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth placed a phone call to a doctor’s office in Muskogee. He reached Tom Coburn, a 5 6-year-old family practitioner. “You should run for the Senate,” said Moore. But Coburn wasn’t interested. He had just survived a bout with colon cancer, and said he had not enjoyed Washington all that much the first time around, when he was a three-term congressman in the 1990s. He preferred delivering babies in the maternity ward to kissing them on the campaign trail.

Then his health improved. He went skiing in December. The phone continued ringing and letters jammed his mailbox. A “Draft Coburn” website appeared on the Internet. Even though the kingpins of the state GOP had anointed Kirk Humphreys as Nickles’s successor, polls showed the former mayor of Oklahoma City struggling against the likely Democratic nominee, Rep. Brad Carson.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.