Blanche Lincoln's Backward Thinking

Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln didn't even have the courtesy to show up to vote down the public option today, instead voting no by proxy in the Senate Finance Committee. She released this statement about her no vote.

Arkansans have told me they support health care reform that forces insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions and prevents them from dropping coverage when you become seriously ill. We can achieve these goals, stabilize the cost of coverage for Arkansans who have health insurance, and expand coverage to the uninsured and underinsured without creating a purely public, new government program, which most Arkansans do not support. I have promised my constituents that I will fight for health insurance reform that is deficit neutral, now and in the future, and that creates more choices for small businesses and their workers and the self-employed. These are important priorities that I believe we can achieve.

In addition, I am working to ensure that requiring Americans to purchase health insurance does not result in a personal windfall for health insurance company executives. My amendment would cut the tax shelter, from $1 million to $500,000, of what businesses are able to deduct for executive compensation. This is a fair policy change aimed at lowering insurance costs to consumers and reassuring them that insurance companies are not receiving excessive tax breaks while at the same time profiting from a government mandate.

First of all, the part I boldfaced is not true. In fact, Daily Kos did a Research 2000 poll just two weeks ago showing that Arkansans favored a public option by 55-38, with independents supporting it by roughly the same number (56-34) and Democrats overwhelmingly in favor, 81-14.

Second, Lincoln is in trouble for re-election. The Rasmussen numbers out today show her losing to all challengers, topping out at around 41% of the vote. While the Kos/R2K poll was more favorable, she still never beat 47% in any of those polls, and her fav-unfav numbers were 43/49. She's going to need some help from Democrats to win re-election.

I know that national Democrats would probably actively work for her defeat given today's votes. The Senate campaign committee is pretty much an incumbency protection racket, but they may be stretched fairly thin in 2010. Most important, Blanche Lincoln needs to win over her fellow Democrats in Arkansas. This will anger them, and the attempt at faux-populism by including an amendment to cut the tax shelter for health insurance company executives cuts pretty hard against her vote to roll back the estate tax for the richest families in America. There will probably be competition to Lincoln's left, and because it is likely to come from the fairly robust Arkansas Green Party, it will show up in the general election, not just a primary. Therefore, it is deeply in the interests of Lincoln to keep the Democratic base in Arkansas satisfied with her performance, and given the poll numbers, that points to supporting a public option. But she did not do that today.

The real test here is whether Lincoln would vote to filibuster the health care bill if a public option is included on the floor via amendments. If she does, it is more likely to hurt her in 2010 than help her, which I don't think she fully understands.

Pressure Works

Several weeks ago Digby and Blue America noticed that Blanche Lincoln, one of the few centrist Democrats facing re-election in 2010, was taking the side of the insurance companies over her constituents in the health care debate. She claimed that "if all Congress comes up with is a government-backed plan, then there will be very little incentive for the private industry to be able to be competitive perhaps in the plans they will be offering and the individuals they will be offering,” showing exactly where her sympathies lie - with those poor, henpecked insurance industry CEOs who scrape by on $14.9 billion dollars over five years.

So we decided to do something about it. Blue America kicked off the Campaign for Health Care Choice and produced three advertisements to press Lincoln on supporting a quality public insurance option to compete with private companies. Digby write the spots, John Amato helped with locations and logistics, I directed and edited them, Howie Klein managed the fundraising. Blue America held a contest to pick the best spot, and after raising $23,740, voters chose their favorite:



Today, we can announce that, before the spots even fully hit the airwaves in Arkansas, Blanche Lincoln is already hedging on her rejection of a public insurance option.

Lincoln, who’s getting hammered by ads demanding she commit to the public option, has now shifted towards supporting one, at least in rhetorical terms. In a piece for today’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, she says health care reform should include a public plan or a non-profit substitute.

Here’s the key graf from Lincoln (the piece is subscription only):

Health care reform must build upon what works and improve inefficiencies. Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans. Options should include private plans as well as a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals as those of a public plan.

The assertion that reform “should” have a public plan or non-profit substitute is a shift from her previous position, which was only that she was “evaluating” a public plan or a substitute.

In this op-ed, Lincoln makes absolutely no mention of an employer mandate to provide coverage to their workers, which Wal-Mart, America's largest employer and a virtual kingmaker in Arkansas, signed onto this week. Instead, Lincoln goes out of her way to support a public insurance option in competition with private insurance. There are weasel words there, of course - note the "non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals." And I don't doubt that Wal-Mart's general support of something called health care reform played a role. But in the final analysis, two events happened to Blanche Lincoln in health care recently - Wal-Mart's sign-on to the employer mandate and the prospect of Blue America running ads in her state ($25,000 can go a fairly long way on cable in Arkansas, by the way). She chose to specifically align herself with the element of health care policy that Blue America endorses.

But she's not all the way there, so we plan to keep pushing. But this should be a valuable lesson - every small thing you do to advance solutions to the health care crisis can make a difference. The political animals in the Senate know that on this high-profile vote, defying the public on a popular plank will cause them some difficulty. It's up to us to make sure of that.

Please support the Campaign for Health Care Choice so we can continue to raise the pressure on the ConservaDems who want to hijack this crucial policy goal.

Chart Of The Day

Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Jon Kyl (D-AZ) teamed up today to offer a budget amendment that would offer $250 billion dollars in tax cuts to families that inherit estates worth over $7 million dollars. Tremayne at Open Left links to this chart showing just exactly who this tax policy would affect.

Hard to see it, but those with annual incomes in the millions are represented by the vertical red line on the left and those making less than a million (i.e., almost everyone) are the horizontal red line on the bottom. Lincoln and Kyle are concerned about the people on the vertical red line. Actually, as the OpEd piece linked above points out, the concern is not for everyone on the vertical red line but only the wealthiest of those wealthy.

Why would Lincoln, a Democrat, be so concerned about that tiny and very wealthy segment of the population I wondered.

This is not so hard to find, and Tremayne was able to locate the source of Lincoln's concern, which begins with Wal and ends with Mart.

But, are there any rich people at all in Arkansas? Turns out there are. Here are the richest 5 families there:

1. Sam Walton Family (Wal-Mart, inheritance)

2. Witt and Jack Stephens Family (finance)

3. Charles Murphy Family (oil, etc.)

4. Winthrop Paul Rockefeller Family (inheritance money, ha ha)

5. Don Tyson Family (chicken)

I wonder, does Blanche Lincoln have any connections to these rich families? Is that why she is so concerned about them she is cosponsoring an amendment that won't help hardly anyone else? Hmmm.

A little more Googling around and I found this, the list of the top 5 contributors to Blanche Lincoln's reelection campaign:

Stephens Group: $34,200
DaVita Inc: $32,000
Wal-Mart Stores: $25,800
Tyson Foods: $24,750
Goldman Sachs: $24,000

Very interesting. Let's see if there is any overlap with the above list of rich families. Hey, lookie there: 3 of the top four contributors are also on the top five wealthiest families in Arkansas. How about that?

I don't think it even has to be that complicated. The Walton family wields tremendous power in Arkansas that can be measured well beyond campaign contributions, and Lincoln has an interest in ensuring their ability to hoard money and make them richer.

The New York Times hit this with an editorial today. But Blanche Lincoln is simply an example of a Democrat beholden to a certain sector on key issues, in this case ultra-rich department store owners. There are niche sectors for plenty of other Democrats: the credit card industry in South Dakota and Delaware, the financial sector in New York, the auto sector in Michigan, farm states like Minnesota and North Dakota and Iowa. These regional anomalies have frustrated progressive change for some time, making this a sclerotic country that seems stuck in molasses and unable to move forward on important issues. There's a path to neutralize these forces, but let's get real - we're going to be dealing with this in some form forever.

Manipulating the Markets

Howie Klein has been all over the Employee Free Choice Act today as it begins debate in the Congress. He highlights all the Democrats who were co-sponsors of the same bill in 2007 and 2008 but not now, and then he offers a plausible reason why, in a guest post by Dennis Shulman, the blind rabbi who ran for Congress in 2008 in New Jersey, and was essentially offered what amounts to a bribe by contributors in an attempt to get him to not support the pro-labor bill. They really messed with the wrong guy:

My support for EFCA, in a way, was more than forty years in the making. When I was fifteen years old, going blind, and working to help support my family, I worked for minimum wage after school and during the summers in a factory that hired disabled workers. As a high school student, 85 cents an hour was not bad in 1966. But, as I assembled the toy parts hour after hour, I was surrounded by men and women in their thirties and forties and fifties, some of them veterans, some of them with families, also making 85 cents an hour [...]

Over the years, that experience in that factory in Worcester, Mass., never left me. Especially in these times of economic crisis, if we are going to have a nation in which the middle class family is to be strong, then we have to have a nation that gives organized labor a level playing field. If we are going to have working families that have the buying power to keep our economy growing, then we have to support labor. If we are going to have a nation which honors hard work, then we are going to have to give labor the opportunity to freely choose organization [...]

Too many times during the last year, at campaign fund raisers, people who had large interests in manufacturing would approach me to “discuss” my position on the Employee Free Choice Act. Although my factory experience from the 1960’s outweighed the pressure exerted in 2008 every time, the campaign system favors manufacturers with money to contribute to the candidate. Let us hope as EFCA is being discussed and voted on in Congress this week that our representatives vote for what is right and fair and in the best interest of our nation, and not for what is personally lucrative.

Read between the lines and you get a picture of manufacturing interests conditioning their support for Shulman based on his position on Employee Free Choice. That's their right, of course. But it's startling to see the banking industry working in concert to actually damage stocks in a play to get Congress to back down.

Citigroup Inc. lowered its rating on Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to hold from buy on Tuesday, citing concern that legislation intended to make it easier for employees to unionize would raise the retail giant's labor costs and hurt its competitiveness.

Deborah Weinswig, a Citigroup analyst, cut her price target on the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer to $48 from $53.

Wal-Mart (WMT) shares rose 2.4% to $48.65 in early afternoon trading, in line with the broader markets. Still, its percentage gain was one of the smallest among components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The proposed Employee Free Choice Act, a top priority for unions this year, was formally introduced Tuesday by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa., and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.

Wal-Mart has a comfortable enough position in the marketplace - their sales are actually up - that they could handle a stock jolt. But they could also show that jolt to people like Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor and Vic Snyder, Arkansas Democrats who supported Employee Free Choice in the past but would be presented with information that it would lead to a hit to the bottom line of the main employer and political player in their state.

The Citigroup report is bad analysis, by the way. Shocking, I know, that someone at Citi would make a bad decision. As much as Wal-Mart having to pay reasonable wages and benefits would cut into their profits, the increase in overall wages as a result of unionization would bolster purchasing power for precisely the kind of people who shop at Wal-Mart. It's just a fact that unions help workers achieve higher wages, and that the wage stagnation at the middle class and below has been crushing America in the past decade. If Wal-Mart and employers like them could spend two seconds looking past their own immediate self-interest, they would recognize that a strong middle class with good union jobs would lift everybody throughout the economy. And all the Employee Free Choice Act would do is to ensure fairness in the unionization process, by punishing employers who fired or intimidated workers and giving the power back to workers to decide how to organize themselves.

Blame Americans First

There could be a thousand reasons for why Arkansas Democratic Party chair Bill Gwatney was shot and critically wounded today, and I'm not going to speculate on this fully. But it's increasingly curious, this little boomlet of disgruntled white men who have lost their jobs or their livelihoods, and end up happening to shoot Democrats or into crowds with a liberal bent (see the Universalist Unitarian Church in Knoxville, TN).

It could be nothing like that, it could be that the shooter was a former employee of one of Gwatney's car dealerships. At any rate it's a terrible tragedy for all involved. But it's not like that would be a crazily irresponsible speculation. We're talking about a Republican Party whose members routinely make comments like this.

At a debate in New Mexico for the open GOP-held Second District late last week, Republican nominee Ed Tinsley accused his Dem opponent Harry Teague of wanting to cut the throats of American troops in Iraq:

"How can I call my two nephews over there right now ... and tell them I'm running against a guy that will cut your throat -- that will cut the bottom out of your funding," Tinsley said.

The eliminationist rhetoric is pervasive in Republican circles, and not everybody takes it as a joke. Providing a safe haven for violent thoughts and a target to act them out on invites those predisposed to domestic terrorism to take flight. This knee-jerk hatred of fellow Americans, this ratcheting up of rhetoric and finding convenient sources of blame, is incredibly dangerous.

BTW, how many conservatives are going to apologize to Rick Perlstein, who was laughed out of those circles for suggesting in his book Nixonland that Americans still fantasize about killing one another over political and cultural disagreements. I'm sure he'll again take no pleasure in the vindication.

UPDATE: Bill Gwatney has died. RIP. What a horrible situation.

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin is p.o.'ed that she's being blamed for the tragedy. She would never think of blaming liberals for being "unhinged" enough to commit violence, after all. Jesse:

The problem isn’t that you say things with which liberals disagree. The problem is that you say things which quite openly advocate grossly racist and dehumanizing attitudes, that you’re obsessed with declaring the most innocent of statements and actions traitorous and threatening, and that you’re generally crazy stalkerish asshole. And whenever you’re held responsible for the insane, dangerous things that you say, you hide behind freedom of speech as if it entails freedom from responsibility for what you say.

...oh yeah, I should also mention that Malkin revealed the full name and email address of her accuser. Classy!