The No-Bullshit Caucus

You will never find them gathered together, because they have never held a meeting, much less a fund-raising cocktail party or dinner. They have never issued a press release or a list of talking points for one of their members to disgorge on a TV talk show. They have no legislative agenda and no common set of policies, programs or beliefs. Among their ranks you will find members as far left and right as anyone in the United States Congress.

Few if any of them even think of themselves as members--which is perfectly reasonable since they have earned membership only through the highly informal judgments of their colleagues, their subordinates and members of the press. Yet of all the honors these men and women may accumulate in their years in Washington, for all the trophies, plaques, scrolls and statuettes that clutter their offices, a nomination to this caucus is what sets them apart from the vast majority of their peers.

What caucus?

The No-Bullshit Caucus.

Members are not defined by their voting record but by their willingness to speak (more or less) plain English in a Washington world where the official language is Bloviation: a tongue that extends a simple sentence into a multisyllabic assault on common sense. Members are likely to call a spade a spade; most of their congressional colleagues are just as likely to call a spade a handheld implement used for the purpose of removing soilage from the firmament. More important, they exhibit a willingness, sometimes an eagerness, to commit political heresy, to challenge the orthodoxies of their own party's partisans and interest groups.

After nearly 40 years of working in and then covering American politics, I've found few memories more enduring than those of a political figure exemplifying the traits of a No-Bullshit Caucus member.

In 1968, as a very young aide working on Robert Kennedy's doomed presidential campaign, I watched Kennedy engage college audiences on questions of war, peace and the draft.

"How many of you support student deferments?" he would ask. The vast majority of hands would be raised.

"I'm against them," he'd say to a chorus of boos.

Then he would ask who got these deferments: those in college and graduate school, mostly people of solidly middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Whom did that leave out? Overwhelmingly, blacks, Latinos and poor whites. He'd tell them of families with two or three brothers who had been drafted and sent to Vietnam because there was no money or connections to get them into college.

Often he'd add, "When my son is ready for college, he's going to get in because his father is a wealthy and powerful man." If this generation is really passionate about social justice and fairness, Kennedy would conclude, it can't in good conscience back this special privilege for itself.

In the summer of 1977 I followed New York representative Ed Koch through a series of Brooklyn beach clubs during his mayoral campaign; his prospects were sufficiently dim that I was the only member of the press to tag along that day. One of Koch's campaign planks was a firm pledge not to permit police officers and firefighters to strike. On this day his handshaking was interrupted by a middle-aged woman who angrily informed him that her son was a police officer and that the police were inadequately paid for the dangers they faced.

"Madam," Koch said flatly, "your son does not have the right to put the public safety in danger."

In 1992 former senator Paul Tsongas was speaking before an audience of committed New Hampshire environmentalists. One asked if, as a symbol of his commitment to the cause, Tsongas would require his senior staff members to use mass transit.

"Are you nuts?" Tsongas said in effect. (I am paraphrasing here, but the tenor of his reply could not have been more blunt.) "If I've got a major national security crisis on my hands, you want my advisors to wait for the Metro?"

Another member of the same group, no doubt responding to Tsongas's slight build and slight lisp, wondered if he would be "tough enough" to stand up to powerful lobbyists. Tsongas, who was in a long-term battle with the lymphoma that would ultimately take his life, looked at his questioner for a long moment and replied, "Have you ever had to tell your children that you are going to die?"

That political journalists treasure such moments testifies to the infrequency of plain, honest political speech. But why? Why is it so hard to come by?

Here, based on public and private conversations with politicians and journalists, are some answers.

Why Do Most Politicians Talk That Way?

"I grew up in Lawrenceburg," says Fred Thompson, the former senator from Tennessee whose career has taken him from the Senate Watergate Committee staff to Hollywood to the United States Senate and back to acting. He plays the only-in-fantasyland pro-life, pro-death penalty Manhattan district attorney on Law & Order. "Lawrenceburg was the county seat," Thompson says, "and people used to talk about coming to town to hear the lawyers on a Saturday. They'd get up and make these grand, flowery arguments, and it was entertainment."

Lawyers, Thompson notes, are not trained in clear, simple speech (a point this law-school refugee can heartily second). When they move into politics, "there's a tendency to behave and act the way they envision someone in their position ought to behave and act. In other words, they put on their senator's cap or vice president's or presidential candidate's cap. That means they should sound a certain way--very serious and knowledgeable--and if there's any humor, it's well scripted. That's a terrible mistake politicians make. But I think it's a protective cloak of some kind; it serves as protective armament."

And this (continued on page 132)Caucus(continued from page 70) protective cloak is reinforced by the hothouse atmosphere of modern politics.

"Everything's on a hair trigger," says one of the Senate's more independent-minded members. "You have high-priced political consultants telling you, 'Stay within the margins--one slip could be your George Romney slip [referring to the Michigan governor whose 1968 presidential run was fatally damaged when he offhandedly commented that he was "brainwashed" about Vietnam].' And the press is looking for that one slip. So you're conditioned as a politician to be very careful not to really answer the question. They train you that way."

When a politician makes it to the higher rungs of the ladder, that caution is reinforced, as is the sense of self-importance. If you've ever wondered why a senator spends almost every minute of his or her question time at a hearing making a speech that reeks of self-importance and then complains when a witness takes 15 seconds with an answer, listen to one of their own:

"The Senate," this member says wryly, "is the greatest assisted-living facility in the world. You get a pretty powerful sense of your own importance." Elevators are held; you summon a page with literally a snap of your fingers. Your staff talks as if you are the only member of the body. To illustrate the point, the senator I'm speaking with gets up and pantomimes an entrance into the Senate dining room, pointing to various dishes, snapping his fingers impatiently and saying, "I'll have this. I'll have that. And bring it to my table." It's not that hard to see, says my senatorial confidant, why "all senators believe that the entire world is hanging on their every word."

This lethal mixture of timidity and self-aggrandizement can take its toll even on those who begin their public life in a very different mode. Consider John Kerry: When he was a young man commanding a Swift boat in Vietnam, his letters home were strikingly vivid and direct, filled with sharply observed events and stark emotion. But after 20 years in the Senate, Kerry often spoke as if he were clutching a toga, endlessly wrapping his words in a fog of bafflegab. To offer just one example: "It is time America had a president who understands that strength abroad means providing real leadership in the world and taking responsibility for the bad as well as the good. And strength at home means building a stronger economy by getting results for the American people and demanding accountability."

"There were times," says longtime Washington Post writer David Broder, "when I thought, My God, he sounds like Bob Dole." Dole, by the way--one of the great senators of the 20th century but a full-fledged disaster as a presidential candidate--once replied to a college student who asked about acid rain, "That bill's in markup."

And maybe there's another, starker reason for the senatorial blather.

"If you're a senator," Broder asks, "what do you do besides talk? You go to Capitol Hill in the morning, and at the end of the day you're exactly where you were at the beginning of the day, and all you've done in between is fill up the air with talk. So that's what they do."

What makes a No-Bullshit Politician?

Remember the three keys to smart real estate investing? Location, location, location. That's one key to finding political straight shooters. Historically they're much more likely to come from the West than from the coasts or the major population centers. Think of Mike Mansfield, the taciturn Montana senator who set the all-time record for the most questions asked of a guest on Meet the Press because his answers were so short. Think of Arizona's Barry Goldwater, whose off-the-cuff comments on nuclear weapons dogged him in the 1964 presidential campaign and whose libertarian leanings prompted him to say almost 20 years later that "every good Christian ought to kick Jerry Falwell in the ass." Think of Arizona representative Mo Udall, who once observed at an endless political dinner, "Everything that can be said has already been said. It's just that not everyone has said it yet." Think of former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, one of the first political figures to protest the draconian, hugely hypocritical war on drugs.

"Westerners," says Broder, "tend to be blunt, to be much more direct and not to bullshit about things."

Wisconsin, of course, is more Midwest than West, but it is a state with a long string of plainspoken maverick political figures, ranging from governor and senator Robert La Follette, the father of 20th century progressivism, to ex-senator William Proxmire, who mocked government boondoggles, to Senator Russ Feingold, who was almost unanimously nominated for the No-Bullshit Caucus.

"Wisconsin senators are independent," says Feingold. "This is the whole tradition." You're expected to be on the side of the environment and civil rights. "But to be somebody you can always guarantee is going to be with the team? That's not what Wisconsin senators do, and it's not what the people of our state want us to do," Feingold says. When he voted to confirm John Ashcroft as attorney general in 2001--only eight of 50 Democrats did so--he stirred angry responses among some Wisconsin Democrats. A year later, when he was the only senator to oppose the USA Patriot Act, "people began to realize that this is the way I do my job," he says. "Others were like, 'Well, good, now he's back in the fold.' But the problem is that sometimes people think, Oh good, he's joined our team. But I'm not on any team."

But if geography helps some politicians develop an immunity to bullshit, an even greater measure of protection is provided by something else: a rich, varied and even dangerous past life that makes the risks of politics seem substantially less daunting.

If, for instance, you spent five and a half years in a North Vietnamese hellhole, with torture a more or less regular part of your life, you are not likely to be cowed if a lobbyist or Republican operative accuses you of political heresy. Indeed, you are likely to feel a sense of political as well as personal liberation. That's why one of the enduring delights of Senator John McCain's 2000 campaign was that he began every day on his "Straight Talk Express" by proclaiming that everything--everything--was on the record. Apart from winning the gratitude of the traveling press, McCain could campaign utterly free of the chilling fear that his every phrase contained the seeds of his political destruction. This freedom also explains McCain's willingness, if not his eagerness, to take on some of the most sacred elements of the Republican Party canon. Compared with what he has lived through, is it really that threatening if an antitax group vows to run attack ads against you? Independence, of course, does not guarantee political immunity; the under-the-table assaults launched on McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary clearly inflicted serious damage.

But it doesn't take brutal imprisonment to armor a public figure against the normal tendency to duck and cover. Chuck Hagel was a Vietnam combat veteran who then had a successful business career before entering the Senate. His Nebraska colleague, Bob Kerrey, was a Medal of Honor recipient in Vietnam and launched a successful restaurant business before entering politics. Ex-New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, one of the more independent-minded members of the Senate, did not need politics to feel admiration or even adulation. He had plenty of that as a basketball star. Ronald Reagan had the same dose of celebrity worship as an actor, as did Fred Thompson.

No-Bullshit as a Political Winner

The vast majority of politicians who stay imprisoned within the confines of the political margins do so out of a primal survival instinct. It is, they are convinced, the way to stay alive in the only world that matters to them; to do otherwise is to risk everything, they believe.

"It's like you're kind of stepping into the unknown," Thompson says. '"What if they don't like me? What if just being myself is not enough?' And if you're a professional politician, losing an election is equivalent to losing your medical or law license. You've been deprived of your profession. That's heavy stuff."

But there's a splendidly ironic twist to the fear and hunger for survival that muffles their voice: It's not necessary. In fact, the most persistent, inexplicable miscalculation made by much of America's political class is that a heavy dose of bullshit is an integral ingredient in the recipe for survival. The reality is that voters are desperate for the sound of an authentic human voice talking honestly to them.

"I've seen it time and time again," says Thompson. "If people would just let their hair down a bit, come across as you'd find them in private conversation, they would be a lot more likable and a lot more successful."

"People like it," says Feingold of his independence. "At least in Wisconsin, if they sense you're giving it a straight shot, if they think you're actually analyzing the issue and asking the right questions, they may not agree with your conclusions, but their feeling is you're doing your job, not blowing smoke at them. People love that."

There's plenty of evidence that this is true beyond America's dairy land. In 1992 Ross Perot got 19 percent of the vote for president--the second-highest total for any modern third-party presidential candidate--despite its being clear by Election Day that his seat back and tray table were not in the full upright, locked position. Why? In large part because he talked in clear, simple language about his ideas: comparing the enormous budget deficit to a "crazy aunt up in the attic who nobody wants to talk about" and proposing a 50-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax, saying, "Here's the one you're not gonna like!"

Eight years later McCain's long-shot presidential bid was fueled in no small measure by the promise--substantially fulfilled--of straight talk. I saw this firsthand in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he told people that their naval base might have to be closed, and in Manhattan, where he expressed views on abortion and gun control with which most of the overwhelmingly liberal crowd fervently disagreed. Still, many said they would do the unthinkable--vote Republican--if he were the nominee.

Feingold, himself a possible presidential contender next time out, says of his Republican colleague, "It may be that the Republicans will have such a desire to win again that they would actually accept a straight shooter. The general public would support him, and he would win easily." And why? Here Feingold makes a point echoed by more than one member of the caucus: "We've been through a very long period in which people have manipulated political expression for the purpose of upsetting people and used phony approaches to fears in a way that has been rewarded. But voters are catching on to that, and that era could come to an end."

Why it Matters

If Feingold is right, the rise of no-bullshit politics can't come a moment too soon. It's not that politicians have ever been admired for their intellectual bravery or wisdom. A century ago Mark Twain said, "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." More than half a century ago, in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell compared most political rhetoric to "a cuttlefish spurting out ink."

But the United States is entering a time when the political class will have to make very hard choices about very big matters. The promise of a debt-free, ever more prosperous country, which seemed a reality barely five years ago, is gone. The massive baby-boom generation, little more than five years away from Social Security and Medicare, will tax public resources in a way we have never seen before.

"That's where we're headed," Thompson says, "and everybody knows that. If we were doing the right thing, we would ditch 75 percent of what Congress has on its plate up there right now and focus. And that's the most discouraging part of politics--that we can't come together on even those basic things that are most important to the next generation and to our country's longevity and success, or have somebody who can look the American people in the eye and say, "This is the deal.' "

If Thompson's right--and there is broad agreement across the spectrum that he is--then cutting through the bullshit is not a matter of aesthetics or clarity or even intellectual honesty: It's a matter of survival. Democrats will have to say more about entitlements than "They must be protected just the way they are." Republicans will have to begin wondering whether massive tax cuts are the nostrum for every economic circumstance.

And here's the most intriguing possibility of all: As McCain and then Howard Dean demonstrated, the Internet makes it possible for ordinary citizens of no particular wealth or clout to aggregate their money and their energy to produce impressive amounts of both. For the first time a mechanism exists that can override the two-party fix that has dominated politics for a century and a half. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that a pair of credentialed mainstream political figures--one from each party--may mount an independent campaign to speak plainly, clearly and bluntly to the country about what needs to be done.

And they could do a lot worse than to run under the banner first unfurled by Oklahoma senator Fred Harris more than 30 years ago: "No more bullshit."

It would make one hell of a campaign song.

Left, Right and Center

We Name Names

Members of the caucus were chosen after a wide-ranging, rigorously informal survey of congressional press secretaries, journalists and a handful of Senate and House members. There was no political or ideological litmus test, but there were limits. For instance, former Ohio representative James Traficant was certainly a blunt speaker--he once suggested locking feuding House members in an airtight room and forcing them to consume flatulence-causing food--but his conviction for bribery disqualified him. Ex-senator Jesse Helms made his views clear, but his role as "the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country," as Washington Post columnist David Broder put it, placed him beyond the pale. Debunkers of any or all of these nominees who base their objection on a particular vote or temporizing conduct should note that we are grading on a curve here.

Senator John McCain (R.-Ariz.)

The chairman by acclamation. This self-proclaimed "proud Reagan conservative" campaigned in 2000 against some of the most beloved items in the GOP canon, including across-the-board tax cuts aimed principally at the affluent. He championed campaign-finance reform, assailed the tobacco companies and, though he is a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq, all but demanded the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and assailed the mistreatment of prisoners and detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Critics have questioned his full-throated support and (literal) embrace of President Bush during Bush's 2004 campaign, concluding it was a strategy to position himself for 2008.

But McCain has shown few signs of political orthodoxy. Throughout 2005 he chaired Senate investigations that peeled back the smarmy lobbying efforts of Jack Abramoff, including his links to then House majority leader Tom DeLay and other powerful Republicans. McCain's sense of humor is irrepressible; the former Navy flier delights in distinguishing himself from veterans of other services by explaining, "My parents were married."

Senator Russ Feingold (D.-Wis.)

The other principal campaign-finance-reform leader, Feingold was a virtually unanimous choice for the caucus. It's a rare officeholder who risks his political future by walking away from the huge financial advantages incumbency provides. But in 1998 Feingold did just that by agreeing to sharp limits on campaign spending. When national Republicans began spending large sums of money on behalf of his opponent, Feingold refused to let Democrats attack his opponent with so-called soft money. Feingold told them, "Get the hell out of my state with those things." He won by only three percentage points. He has often angered members of his own party. After the 1996 election, he called for an independent counsel to look into fund-raising practices of the Clinton-Gore campaign, and during the Clinton impeachment proceedings he was the only Democrat to vote against dismissing the charges without hearing evidence.

An ardent civil libertarian, he cast the lone vote in the Senate against the Patriot Act, but he also voted to confirm the ardently conservative John Ashcroft as attorney general and John Roberts as chief justice. His passion for reform extends into his own pocket: He has repeatedly voted against cost-of-living increases for members of the Senate, even though he has one of the lowest net worths of any senator.

Senator Tom Coburn (R.-Okla.)

You won't find a more socially conservative member of the Senate than Coburn, who has actually suggested that if abortion is outlawed, those who provide it might face the death penalty. But Coburn gains entrance by being a politician who not only fulminates against big spending but tries to do something about it--even when it comes with political costs. In 2005 Coburn was the one Senate member to vote against a $31.8 billion Homeland Security spending bill, because, he argued, it was stuffed with grants to local communities that had nothing to do with security. The bill passed 96--1, "reflecting the fact," as the Los Angeles Times wrote, "that almost no senator wanted to be on record as opposing a major antiterrorism bill."

After Hurricane Katrina, Coburn went up against his fellow Republicans again. He took aim at a $286 billion highway bill that included funding for two bridges in Alaska costing nearly a combined half a billion dollars--one the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, the other, by some odd coincidence, named after the Alaskan representative who just happens to chair the committee that authorized the money for the bridges. Coburn proposed that funds for those bridges be redirected to rebuilding a New Orleans--area bridge that had been destroyed by Katrina. Coburn's proposal was overwhelmingly defeated.

I once asked Coburn--on the air--to explain why his party's spending practices had made him angry.

"Oh," Coburn replied, "I'm not sure the right word is angry."

I braced myself for the inevitable political side step: I'm disappointed, I regret, I would have preferred, etc.

Here's what he said: "It's more ... disgust."

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.-Calif.)

You may expect this San Francisco--based politician from one of the bluest states in the union to be a reliably liberal voice and vote. But in Feinstein's case, you'd be moderately mistaken--because moderate is the key here. She backs the death penalty, supported the president's 2001 tax cuts and voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq in the fall of 2002. (She later said she regretted her vote, claiming she'd been misled by bad intelligence that exaggerated the threat from Iraq.) She alienated some of her supporters in academia by calling for a six-month moratorium on new student visas after the 9/11 attacks, and she proposed a law barring people from nations that sponsor terrorism from entering the United States. Her most notable break with the Democratic Party's base came in 2003, when she was a leading supporter of school vouchers for the District of Columbia--an idea that teachers unions violently opposed. (Roughly one in 10 delegates to the last three Democratic National Conventions has been a member of a teachers union.) "As a former mayor," Feinstein said, "I believe local leaders should have an opportunity to experiment with programs they believe are right for their area." And Feinstein came down hard on Bill Clinton's frolic with Monica Lewinsky, proposing a formal congressional censure in lieu of impeachment.

Senator Chuck Hagel (R.-Neb.)

On the wall of Hagel's Senate office is a framed quotation from Winston Churchill: "Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature." A reliable Republican vote on most economic and social issues, Hagel has repeatedly faced gale-force outrage from his own party by consistently challenging Bush's foreign policy moves before and during the Iraq war. He was critical of unilateral U.S. actions in Afghanistan, arguing that the White House ignored allies who were willing to engage in the fight on terror. He warned that projections of an easy transition to a post-Saddam regime in Iraq were wildly optimistic and charged in 2002 that Bush was "hell-bent" on going to war. The Vietnam combat veteran has even been willing to use the dreaded V-word in comparing the U.S. position in Iraq to the ill-fated Vietnam quagmire. For his pains he's been called everything from a handwringer to a traitor by some of his fellow Republicans--a charge that would make his potential 2008 presidential bid one of the more intriguing in recent decades.

Representative Barney Frank (D.-Mass.)

This 25-year veteran of the House of Representatives would make the caucus on rhetorical grounds alone; there is no one with a faster, edgier or wittier command of the language than Frank.

The Almanac of American Politics has called him a "political theorist and pit bull, all at the same time," noting that House staff members consistently vote him the brainiest and funniest member. These traits were on display very early; as a young Democratic activist, Frank responded to the defection of segregationist senator Strom Thurmond to the Republicans in 1964 by writing a letter to The New York Times that noted, "It is better to give than to receive." A famous campaign poster from his days as a Boston pol shows a rumpled Frank sitting behind an impossibly cluttered desk and declares neatness isn't everything. When reporters asked Frank if he thought a GOP congressman had been denied a leadership post because he was too moderate or because he was gay, Frank said it was because his colleague was a moderate. And he added, "I'm going to a moderate bar after work tonight."

But it's more than wit. As the first openly gay member of Congress, Frank survived a near-death political embarrassment in 1989 when the press disclosed that Frank had employed a male prostitute as a personal aide and had allowed him the use of his apartment. Frank was up-front about his misjudgment, and his constituents forgave him.

Nor does Frank toe a rigid politically correct line. He publicly chastised San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom for authorizing gay weddings in the face of a contrary state law, calling them "pretend" marriages and "political hoopla with no gain."

When Al Sharpton ran for president in 2004 and almost no one in the Democratic Party dared to criticize the lone African American candidate, Frank was unsparing, saying, "His own record is really just shocking. Sharpton bragged about not paying taxes. If this came out about any other candidate for president, that would be the end of his candidacy."

Frank has a typically blunt explanation for his Frankness: "I don't like to waste words. And I think there is too much bloviating around from politicians. It seems to me that politicians ought to use the same words as other people."

Representative Jeff Flake (R.-Ariz.)

This conservative Republican has shown an extraordinary willingness to take on his party leaders on a variety of issues, arguing that Republicans' deeds simply do not match their words. Flake has gone so far as to vow that he would never ask appropriators for a dollar for any local project while in the House, except for defense matters. As a freshman House member in 2001, he began fighting to lift the ban on U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba and has worked to ease the trade embargo as well. He was also one of only two House members to vote against punishing Sudan for human rights abuses; as a Mormon missionary in Africa, Flake argued that he had seen the human consequences of economic sanctions on third world countries. Flake has bucked his party on everything from Bush's education bill to the prescription drug bill to the $286 billion highway bill.

Representative Artur Davis (D.-Ala.)

If a state in the deep South ever sends an African American to the U.S. Senate, 38-year-old Davis may be a likely contender. He won his office by defeating an incumbent black Democrat whose campaign questioned whether Davis was "black enough" and charged that the only thing Davis, a former federal prosecutor, had "done for black people is put them in jail." Despite the opposition of many members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Davis defeated the incumbent, and he continues to part company with many of the more liberal caucus members on a raft of topics.

Says Davis, "Very few issues fit in this nice little box where you can say, 'I'm going to wear my conservative hat all the time or my liberal hat all the time.' I don't base my position on what people in Washington think." Indeed, a focus on race is something Davis warns against. "Too many of us, black and white," he has said, "are teaching our children first and foremost about what separates us." Davis also parts company with many in his party on social issues and stresses that the "ideologues" dominating primaries often push Democratic nominees too far to the left. "There's a split on gay rights, but Democrats are not comfortable with the definition of marriage being changed or the easy availability of abortion," he says. "But voters in primaries favored no restriction on abortion and were supportive of gay marriage. The challenge in 2008 is to do something with the nominating process, which now provides no meaningful opportunity for debate."

Representative Mike Pence (R.-Ind.)

Like his Senate colleague Tom Coburn (see previous page), Pence is a small-government conservative who challenged his party's congressional leadership by targeting $24 billion in pet projects attached to a major transportation bill Congress had recently passed and proposing cuts to offset the cost of Hurricane Katrina relief. Pence and a handful of colleagues also went after other spending items--not just those dear to liberals, such as health care and food stamps, but also farm subsidies, an item dear to (mostly Republican) farm-state politicians. He is a staunch social conservative who opposes not just abortion but embryonic-stem-cell research. Pence has a libertarian streak as well, which prompted him to author a federal "shield law" bill to protect journalists from having to reveal their sources.

Senator Barack Obama (D.-Ill.)

Even before his landslide election to the Senate in 2004, the self-described "skinny kid with the funny name" was being talked about as a future national candidate thanks to his riveting speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The concrete vividness of his words gave a fresh twist to the familiar "we are one people" theme. "We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states," he said. "We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states." But what makes this 44-year-old a contender for the No-Bullshit Caucus is his willingness to challenge the left flank of his own party. Though Obama voted against the confirmation of John Roberts as chief justice, he rose to the defense of liberals such as Senator Russ Feingold, who was roundly denounced for voting in Roberts's favor.

In an open letter to Daily Kos, an influential website firmly rooted in the Democratic Party's liberal wing, Obama in effect told his party's base that it misunderstood the voters and the country. "Americans don't think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced," he wrote, "but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don't think corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don't think America is an imperialist brute but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated."

And he went further, zeroing in on social issues. "A pro-choice Democrat," he wrote, "doesn't become antichoice because he or she isn't absolutely convinced that a 12-year-old girl should be able to get an operation without a parent being notified. A pro--civil rights Democrat doesn't become complicit in an anti--civil rights agenda because he or she questions the efficacy of certain affirmative action programs. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive 'checklist,' we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straitjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted."

"Too many of us, black and white, are teaching our children first and foremost about what separates us," says U.S. Representative Artur Davis.