Morning Joe Friday showcased a heated debate about just how significant President Obama’s announcement this week of his support for gay marriage really is.

For the prosecution, Joe Scarborough paraphrased conservative commentator Pat Buchanan in calling it “a big fat nothing burger.”

He explained:

[F]irst of all,  who among us thought that Barack Obama was ever personally against gay marriage? Anybody? Nobody. So nothing new there. Secondly, Barack Obama told Robin Roberts that he was taking the Joe Scarborough position, the William F. Buckley position, the Ron Paul position, the federalism position, the 10^th amendment position, the state’s-rights position, that we’re going to let states decide about gay marriage. This is [a] conservative … position.

In other words, Scarborough argued, there was little doubt already about Obama’s personal views on gay marriage. And Obama’s statement that though he personally backs same-sex nuptials, he believes states should be able to ban them if they so choose, is shared by many small-government conservatives.

Scarborough went on to slam the media for blowing the news out of proportion. “I think the New York Times said [it] was a historic moment for gay marriage. It just wasn’t. It was nothing.”

Michael Steele, a former Republican National Committee chair, basically agreed. “There was nothing historic or heroic about what the president said,” argued Steele. “The reality is, the president is not anchored in this issue at all, and for the press to pretend that he is…is ludicrous.”

But other members of the panel disagreed. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson wrote in a column today that Obama’s announcement recalled the heady days of 2008:

He spoke out when he didn’t have to and took a stance that might hurt him in key states, reminding us how he can surprise and inspire. Did I just catch a whiff of that hopey-changey stuff in the air?

But on the show, Scarborough asked Robinson why Obama isn’t doing more to fight for gay marriage, rather than leaving it up to the states. “If you believe that … marriage equality is a civil right protected by the constitution,” Scarborough asked, “how does anyone take any solace in the President of the United States saying, I’m going to leave this to the states?”

Robinson said Obama’s just being pragmatic. “What the president did reflects the reality,” he replied. “Thirty states have state constitutional amendments against gay marriage.

Robinson also went on to argue that Obama’s announcement gradually moves the country toward a time when same-sex marriage will be legal everywhere. “I think what the president did hastens that day,” he said. “It is a moment in a march that I do think will happen.”

And David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, echoed that view. “I do think the bully pulpit matters. I think the president doing this matters for the debate. It kick-starts a conversation,” he said. “Just because he isn’t marching up to Congress with a bill in his hand saying, 'I demand marriage equality now,' doesn’t mean that this was not a significant moment.”

It's worth noting that though the president said states should be able to do what they want, his stance still differs sharply from that of most of the Republican Party, which backs a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage everywhere - a position the Mitt Romney campaign reiterated Thursday.

And perhaps it would be useful to look at the reactions from some actual gay people or groups. The Human Rights Campaign seems to think Obama’s announcement is about more than support for states rights, saying it “extends a message of hope to a generation of young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.” Beth Bye, a gay state legislator from Connecticut, told Talking Points Memo: “You just feel like you want to find President Obama and say, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’”

President Obama’s support for gay marriage is understandably still dominating the headlines, but the Morning Joe gang still found time for some veepstakes talk Thursday.

Mitt Romney told an interviewer Wednesday that he’s considering candidates “of both genders.” Romney has been trailing badly with women voters, which could make the prospect of a female running-mate more appealing. Still, Romney has made clear that his top priority is to pick someone who’s qualified to take over as president.

“I think he has to appeal to women voters for sure, and if he doesn’t do that he’s going to lose the election,” New York magazine’s John Heilemann said. “But I’m not sure that putting a woman who [isn't qualified] on the ticket will succeed.”

Indeed, Romney appears all too aware of the mistake made by John McCain in 2008, when he picked Sarah Palin to share the ticket. Though she fired up the Republican base, the Alaska governor was seen by many as unready to take over the presidency, and created an unwanted distraction for the McCain camp.

“I think they’re not going to make that mistake,” said Heilemann. “And they’re clearly trying to telegraph that they’re not going to make that mistake.”

Heilemann added one intriguing nugget, noting a report in a conservative magazine that Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who ran strongly in 2008, may be getting a close look.

Not to be outdone, TIME’s Mark Halperin said to keep an eye out for “retired women politicians.”

The panel suggested Condoleezza Rice and Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is retiring from the U.S. Senate this year, but Halperin wouldn’t be drawn out.

“Stand by,” he said. Hard to know how much stock to put in that.

There’s no question Romney needs to find a way to win over women, especially those who aren’t married. A USA Today poll of twelve swing states found that he leads President Obama by four points among married women, but trails by a massive 44-point margin among unmarried women.

That may be too big a gap to address through the choice of a running mate. “He’s got a humongous problem,” said Halperin. “I’m not sure picking a woman solves the problem.”

On Tuesday, Mitt Romney made his latest effort at damage control on the subject of the Obama administration’s auto bailout of 2009. Romney opposed the bailout at the time, but it’s proved successful in rescuing the U.S. auto industry, and Team Obama has made the rescue a centerpiece of its campaign, with the contrast to Romney's stance clear. 

“My own view, by the way, was that the auto companies needed to go thru bankruptcy before government help. And frankly that’s finally what the president did,” Romney told an interviewer Tuesday. “So I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.”

It’s easy to scoff at that claim. After all, Romney, the son of an auto executive, famously authored an op-ed in the New York Times in late 2008 headlined: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” In it, Romney argued: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.”

So Romney's current stance, that he supported government help for the industry all along, is a tough sell. 

“Is this what psychiatrist call cognitive dissonance?” Joe Scarborough asked on Wednesday’s Morning Joe.

“This is such a losing argument for him,” agreed Willie Geist. “He’s just getting twisted in knows on this.”

But it’s worth understanding exactly why Romney’s claim that the Obama administration pursued the course he was recommending is so misleading. And as luck would have it, the Morning Joe gang was joined, via phone, by Steven Rattner, the financier who ran the bailout on behalf of the administration.

“There’s just no argument in support for his position,” said Rattner. And he cogently explained why:

The fundamental difference between what Mitt Romney was saying and what President Obama did, is Mitt Romney was saying, let the companies go bankrupt, let them deal with their union contracts on their own, and then on the way out somewhere, maybe the government could provide a little financing. That was a fantasy, because … in late 2008, early 2009, there was no private financing. That’s why the government got involved in the first place, by the way, under President Bush, who certainly did not want to put money in the auto companies, but felt he had to, because otherwise what would have happened – and this is what Romney is in denial about – would have been that they would have run out of money, shut their doors, and liquidated, and there would have been no auto industry. So the process that President Obama followed was the only process that could have worked, which was a managed bankruptcy, with government help from the beginning, and using the government stick to force major concessions by the UAW, by the bondholders, by all the stakeholders.

So there you have it. It’s not hard to figure out that Romney’s playing fast and loose with the facts on this. But it’s useful nonetheless to understand exactly how and why. 

Rick Santorum finally came out Monday and endorsed Mitt Romney for the presidency. But the former Pennsylvania senator did it in a way that was so grudging -- he waited until the thirteenth paragraph of an email sent to supporters at around 11pm -- as to seriously damage his chances of having much pull with the Romney camp going forward.

“This meeting, this email, did nothing to endear him to the Romney folks,” said Politico’s Mike Allen on Morning Joe Tuesday. “We’re about to have a big test of the backbone of the Romney campaign. Will they deny Rick Santorum a speaking slot [at the convention]?”

“There’s people at the top of the campaign who have concluded that the chances that Rick Santorum will give a helpful speech, an on-message speech, are zero,” Allen continued. “And so there’s a big push to say, we’re just not going to have him speak.”

GOP consultant Mark McKinnon said the Romney campaign would pay little price for shutting Santorum out.

“There’s many other conservatives that can speak at the convention that will rally the conservative base in a way that’s probably greater than Rick Santorum could,” McKinnon said. “So there’s no downside to just telling him to take a hike.”

As for Joe Scarborough, he made his feelings clear. “I wouldn’t let a guy like this anywhere near the stage,” he said.

Willie Geist noted that another of Romney’s defeated opponents offered a similarly lukewarm endorsement recently. “Newt Gingrich was only slightly less tepid last week,” Geist said.

Allen said both Gingrich and Santorum waited too long to back Romney, and miscalculated their positions.

“They both think that they have way more leverage than they do,” he said, noting that recent polling shows over 90 percent of voters in both parties support their respective nominees.

In other words, said Allen, “the bases are almost already consolidated.”

The Morning Joe gang continued to give President Obama a hard time Tuesday for his “evolving” position on gay marriage.

In the wake of Vice President Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s statements – the latter on Monday’s Morning Joe – that they’re fine with same-sex nuptials, the White House continues to say that, for now at least, the president favors only civil unions.

The hedging isn’t doing much to make him look like a decisive leader. “You have the president sounding very much like Mitt Romney,” said Joe Scarborough. “He’s flip-flopping on this issue, floundering around, looking very bad.”

Katty Kay of the BBC agreed. “I think it’s one of those moments where voters look at that and say, come on, treat me like a grownup here,” she said. “How long can a position stay an evolving position? At some point you know what you feel on this. And I think the public has a pretty good sense of what the president really feels on this, and so if he’s not saying what he feels, it looks cynical.”

Sam Stein of the Huffington Post said Obama’s caution is beginning to hurt him politically. “Yesterday felt a little different, in that it was no longer about where does he stand on a specific issue, it was about him as a character, and whether or not he was being too cute by half in dancing around this issue,” Stein said.

That could force Team Obama’s hand in the coming months, Stein added. “The more that that type of pressure falls on the president, the more the White House will have to do something publicly before either the convention or the election,” he said. “And that wasn’t the case a couple weeks ago.”

Mark McKinnon, a Republican consultant who recently helped found a group to raise concern about the national debt and other issues, said Obama’s not doing his legacy any favors by failing to embrace gay marriage.

“Our grand-children are going to look at this and say, are you kidding me? This was really an issue?” he said. “Of all the issues we’re talking about today, this is the one issue that’s absolutely guaranteed in the Constitution. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Still, that doesn’t make it a slam-dunk for a president fighting for re-election. Stein said he’d talked Monday to a high-ranking Democratic official, who told him the Obama camp is concerned about North Carolina, a socially conservative state he won narrowly in 2008 and wants to hold.

“The fear is that you go out there on a somewhat of a limb [by supporting gay marriage], and then all of a sudden you’re attacked in North Carolina,” Stein said he was told.

Scarborough agreed. “I don’t think there’s any doubt: If the president comes out in support of gay marriage, he loses North Carolina.”

The Morning Joe gang Monday took a look at a new USA Today/Gallup poll of swing states – the first to come out since Mitt Romney emerged last month as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Voters in the 12 battlegrounds gave Obama a 47-45 edge – well within the poll’s margin of error.  

Sixty percent of respondents said they thought Romney would do a good job on the economy over the next four years, compared to 52 percent who said that of the president.

But perhaps the poll’s most interesting finding was an enthusiasm gap that, surprisingly, favors Obama. Fifty-seven percent of Democrats said they’re extremely or very enthusiastic about voting, compared to 46 percent of Republicans who said the same. That’s a major turnaround from last year, when the GOP held a 14-percent edge on the question.

TIME’s Mark Halperin said the swing may be explained by enduring doubts among Republicans about their candidate.

“Governor Romney in some ways is a shocking person to have emerged in today’s Republican Party as the nominee,” said Halperin. “And I think people still haven’t warmed to him.”

But Sam Stein of the Huffington Post found some better news for the former Massachusetts governor. “That same USA Today poll had Obama plus 27 percent on likability over Mitt Romney, but Romney is only 2 percentage points behind,” Stein noted. “If he closes that [likability] gap, combine that with the economic news that might emerge from Europe, he’s sitting in a very enviable position.”

Of course, Halperin said Team Obama will aim to stop Romney from closing the likability gap by “defining him on negative terms” – pundit-speak for relentlessly attacking him.

Republican strategist Mark McKinnon joined the panel a day after his latest Daily Beast column argued that a different enthusiasm gap – this one among  the young voters who in 2008 made up a key part of Obama’s base – could spell trouble for the president.

“Just 50 percent of college-age youth approve of his performance overall,” McKinnon wrote. “That’s 5 points less than their 25-29 year old peers.”

Stein said those low marks among the youngest voters are a result of the Washington bickering that Obama tried unsuccessfully to transcend.

“What’s happened over the past three years is you’ve seen Obama really dragged into that mess that he said he was going to rise above,” said Stein. “And I think that that’s disillusioned a lot of people.”

The government reporterd Friday morning that the economy added a paltry 115,000 jobs in April – well below the already underwhelming 163,000 that economists had predicted. The overall jobless rate actually ticked down a jot to 8.1 percent, but that’s in part because more discouraged workers left the labor force entirely.

On Morning Joe Friday, before the new numbers were released, the gang mulled how significant the jobs stats will be in shaping the race for the White House.

“Is this jobs number what we’re going to be looking at throughout the year to gauge President Obama?” asked Joe Scarborough.

MSNBC contributor Ed Rendell said it’s not worth focusing on too much right now. “What the jobs number is in early May isn’t important,” said the former Pennsylvania governor, a Democrat. ”It looks to me like this economy’s going to bump along until November, just as we’re going. Some progress, not enough for the Obama administration to claim it’s over ... and not enough for the Republicans to really broadside” Obama.

Some might argue that unemployment over 8 percent is more than enough for Republicans to vigorously attack Obama over – just as they’ve been doing. But ad maven and MSNBC contributor Donnie Deutsch said history shows the direction of the jobless rate, rather than the raw number, will be more important in determining the election.

“In the last 50 years, any president where the jobs number has been going in the right direction over the last two years has won,” Deutsch told the panel. “Every president where it’s been going in the wrong direction over two years has lost.”

And there, the news is better for Obama. As Deutsch noted: “In 2010 November, it was I think 9.7 percent [ ed -- in fact, it was 9.6 after the October report, which appeared in early November]. Now its 8.2, and most economists are predicting about 7.9” by Election Day.

Joe Scarborough found that prediction hard to believe. “What economist is telling you that things are going to stay the same or get better?” he asked incredulously.

In fact, Deutsch was right. A recent survey of 32 leading economists conducted by the AP found a belief that the jobless rate will drop below 8 percent by Election Day.

But that’s still extremely high, by historical standards. And Willie Geist noted that the headline jobs figure doesn’t even include the millions of Americans who aren’t looking for work.

“That jobs number is a tough one to read, because even when that ticks down a little bit, it means some people have come out [of the work force], he said, “There are a whole lot of people who aren’t even included in that number who are hurting.”

A new Washington Post poll of Virginia finds that President Obama leads Mitt Romney by seven points, 51-44, a significantly wider margin than the president enjoys in most national polls.

Obama, of course, won the traditionally Republican Old Dominion in 2008, beating John McCain by six points.

On Morning Joe Friday, Joe Scarborough asked: “What happened in Virginia over the past four years that has actually made it look more blue than red?”

MSNBC contributor Ed Rendell offered an explanation. “Northern Virginia, which is really the federal government, it’s federal government workers, has continued to build up its numbers,” said the former Pennsylvania governor. “And I think the north now somewhat outvotes the south.”

Rendell didn’t mention it, but Northern Virginia also has undergone a tech boom over the last decade, drawing young, educated, socially liberal voters to the region.

It’s not just an issue of demographics, though, Rendell, a Democrat, suggested. Moderate Republicans in the Washington D.C. suburbs, as in other upscale suburbs of large east-coast cities, have been leaving the Republican Party in droves.

“The loss of moderate, middle-of-the-road Republicans in the northern part of the state is killing the GOP,” said Rendell.

Still, Rendell cautioned that it’s far too soon for the Romney camp to write the state off. “Virginia’s not lost for Romney,” he said. “Seven points in early May doesn’t mean it’s over.”

“If he can reestablish himself with moderate Republicans and independent voters, and sort of convince them that he really is a middle-of-the-roader, he’s got a shot.”

But as Rendell acknowledged, the far-right positions Romney took while trying to win the Republican nomination will complicate that task. “It’s going to be hard because of what he said in the primary campaigns,” he said.

Indeed, Romney appeared Thursday with Virginia’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, who might not help the candidate close an 18-point gap with women in the state. As Willie Geist noted, Democrats have been reminding voters about McDonnell’s support for a recent bill that at first would have required women seeking an abortion to undergo an invasive vaginal ultrasound (after an outcry, that provision was modified).

Scarborough observed that in an ominous sign, Romney has also been struggling lately in North Carolina, another southern state that until recently was considered solidly red.

“A Republican will not be elected president that does not win Virginia or North Carolina,” he declared.

The Morning Joe gang highlighted a New York Times op-ed by the writer Lee Siegel as one of Thursday’s Must Reads.

Siegel argues that these days, no one aspires to the kind of modest, secure middle-class existence that Willy Loman sought in “Death of a Salesman.”

In our time of banker hustlers, real-estate hustlers and Internet hustlers, of suckers and “muppets,” it is unlikely that anyone associates happiness and dignity with working hard for a comfortable existence purchased with a modest income. Even what’s left of the middle class disdains a middle-class life. Everyone, rich, poor and in between, wants infinite pleasure and fabulous riches.

 …

Perhaps there is a simple, unlovely reason “Death of a Salesman” has become such a beloved institution. Instead of humbling its audience through the shock of recognition, the play now confers upon the people who can afford to see it a feeling of superiority — itself a fragile illusion.

Siegel writes of the demise of “the industries that employed the salespeople, factory workers, middle managers and others in the plentiful, humbler realms of mid-20th-century capitalism begun to dry up,” and adds that “today’s capitalists no longer share Willy’s belief that he could attain dignity through his work.”

But Joe Scarborough pointed out that the fracturing of the American Dream is hardly a development that only surfaced with the Great Recession.

“This is a fear that did not begin five years ago or even four years,” Scarborough said. “I remember in the early '70s driving around upstate New York, and my parents looking at the factories that had closed, going, ‘you know what, things are slipping away.’”

“We’ve been going around in circles for 40 years,” Scarborough added.

There's another thing, too. Plenty of Americans who are struggling to get by -- for instance, the record 46 million living in poverty -- would probably say they'd jump at the chance for a comfortable existence purchased with a modest income. But those people don't fit Siegel's theory.

New Quinnipiac presidential polls out this morning show Mitt Romney making progress in two key swing states, even as President Obama widens his lead in another.

In Florida, Romney now leads 44-43 – an eight-point reversal from late March, when Obama was up by seven. And in Ohio, Obama’s up by just two points, 44-42, after leading by six in late March. Pennsylvania brings better news for Team Obama: There, he’s up 47-39, a five-point swing in his favor.

Meanwhile, Restore our Future, a pro-Romney Super PAC, is readying to launch a $4.3 million ad campaign in nine swing states. The first ad is a rare positive spot, in which a former Bain colleague of Romney’s recounts how, when his teenage daughter vanished in New York City, the future candidate mobilized the firm’s resources in a successful effort to find her.

But the vast majority of Super PAC ads, run by outfits aligned with both sides, will be negative. And David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, told the Morning Joe gang Thursday that the onslaught could work in Romney’s favor.

“There’s a lot of Democrats I talk to, and people within the Obama campaign I talk to, who are worried that they’re just going to be outgunned on this stuff,” Gregory said. They’re concerned, said Gregory, that “however much President Obama’s going to raise, that the Super PACs … are going to blanket swing states with negative ads against the president.”

Democrats fear that the Super PACS aligned with Obama may not be able to keep pace, Gregory added.

But Gregory said he thinks the barrage of attack ads won’t help anyone. “I have a theory that there’s going to be so much negativity that washes through the general election that it’s going to hurt both sides,” he said.

Joe Scarborough agreed. “There’s going to be sort of the law of diminishing returns, and by the end of the process, in all these swing states, these voters are going to be sick of both candidates,” he said.

Mika Brzezinski said she thought voters might “actually tune out --  to the point where it gets that negative and that relentless, you don’t even know what to believe anymore.”

We can hope -- but it’s unclear what hurting both sides would mean. Elections are zero sum games, so the ad onslaught is likely to benefit someone in the end. And campaigns run negative ads because research suggests they work, so the side that runs more of them is likely to have an advantage. Could the ads make governing more difficult for the winner, by so alienating voters? That seems unlikely, and it’s a concern that’s certainly far from the minds of campaign strategists right now.

Still, it’s worth asking why it is that we’re likely to see far higher spending on attack ads by outside groups this year than ever before. And the key reason is the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed  third parties to spend unlimited amounts of corporate money on independent expenditure campaigns.

For those concerned about the coming barrage of negative ads – not to mention the outsized role they allow special interests to play in the process – that’s the place to focus.

President Obama flew to Afghanistan Tuesday for the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. And he used the occasion to announce an agreement with the Afghan government that calls for some U.S. forces to remain in the country beyond the 2014 withdrawal date in order to target al Qaeda, and for the U.S. to provide economic aid through 2024.

On Morning Joe Wednesday, Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations identified plenty of unanswered questions about the commitment.

“What’s the size of the [U.S.] force?” Haass asked. “What’s going be the size of the Afghan force? Who’s going to pay for the Afghan force? How much is it going to cost?”

Haass also said there are “real questions about why this should work, given still the corruption and divisions within the Karzai government.”

Indeed, Haass argued, it’s not even clear what the end goal is. “I think the rationales are still weak,” he said. “ What is it we are really trying to do? To put it another way: Why do we need to do this in Afghanistan if we’re worried about al Qaeda? What’s so different now about Afghanistan than Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and all these other places.”

Joe Scarborough agreed. “Afghanistan now is not as central to al Qaeda’s operations as Yemen,” he said.

“We had a goal – and that goal was to rid Afghanistan of al Qaeda’s power structure. And we succeeded,” Scarborough went on. “And then we moved the goalposts, and now it’s to rebuild the country.”

And Scarborough sounded deeply skeptical about the chances for success in that mission. “[W]e’re going into another decade partnership with one of the most corrupt leaders on the planet,” he said, referring to Karzai. “It makes no sense. We’re wasting $2 billion a week and young Americans are dying every week.”

Haass said the open-ended commitment could end up tying U.S. hands indefinitely.

“To what extent is there an element now that the United States has hitched its wagon to an Afghanistan that’s not run by the Taliban?” he asked. “I think that really remains to be seen.”

Morning Joe regular Sen. Tom Coburn joined the gang Tuesday and made the case that the problem in Washington isn’t that Democrats and Republicans can’t make a deal – it’s that they make too many.

“The problem is not gridlock,” said Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican whose new book, “The Debt Bomb,” sounds the alarm about what he sees as the coming crisis over the deficit. “The problem is that members of both parties agree too much.”

How so?  

“How’d we get to where we’re $16 trillion dollars in debt, we’re running a $1.3 trillion deficit this year?" he asked. "Because people are going to make the short-term politically expedient decision for their career, rather than the best right thing for our country. And when you make the best right thing for our country, there’s a political price to pay.”

But not everyone agrees with Coburn on what the right thing for the country is. He didn’t go into specifics this morning, but based on his record, Coburn would like to address the deficit problem by dramatically cutting spending – including military spending -- and shrinking government. He’s less keen on raising taxes on the rich – once arguing that extending the Bush tax cuts for high earners shouldn’t be counted as a cost to the budget because they were already enacted in the past. Not everyone shares that vision of government. So a basic principled inability to agree on how to cut the deficit may be as significant an obstacle as the moral shortcomings of Coburn’s colleagues in Congress.

“This is the most predictable crisis this country has ever faced, and yet we’ve spent two and a half years really doing nothing about it,” Coburn added. “One in two students can’t get a full-time job now. That’s going to be three in four, or four in five, if we allow this to continue.”

But many economists say something closer to the reverse is true. The deficit problem needs to be addressed in the long-term, they argue, but doing so immediately by radically slashing spending, as Coburn advocates, would cause a major hit to demand, further slowing the halting growth the economy has been showing lately, and worsening the already dire jobs picture. Better, they argue, to get the economy on a more solid footing over the next few years, then get the budget in order over the longer term.

Coburn takes a different view. But again, it’s this difference of opinion, more than any lack of courage, that’s standing in the way of the senator’s agenda being implemented.

Mika Brzezinski asked Coburn whether he agreed that part of the issue was special interests exerting too much sway in Washington. the senator said that’s not a concern for him.

“I don’t think special interests or big corporations are the problem,” he replied. “I think desire to be in power is the problem.”