Oh Ar-kansas! You are a state that I mostly ignore aside from KIPR, the mainstream urban station out of Little Rock that sometimes listen to online or Crittenden County because its apart of the Memphis metropolitan area. However, the stoic tale surrounding your senior U.S. Senator Blanche Lincoln is a textbook example of why I give the Democratic Party the side-eye.
Organized labor and liberals have committed more than $5 million to Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s primary election opponent, Bill Halter, signaling that the Arkansas Democratic Senate primary is shaping up, for the left, as a hill to die on.
Virtually overnight, outside groups have erased the seemingly insurmountable financial advantage Lincoln brought to the contest. On Tuesday, an umbrella of four labor groups that have long been frustrated over Lincoln’s refusal to support card check legislation — the AFL-CIO, Communications Workers of America, AFSCME and United Steelworkers of America — jointly announced they were each pledging to spend $1 million in an all-out effort to dislodge Lincoln.
By Wednesday morning, a coalition of liberal organizations led by MoveOn.org — which blasted out a fundraising appeal calling Lincoln “one of the worst Democratic senators” — had raised an eye-popping $1.1 million for Halter, Arkansas’s lieutenant governor, who announced his candidacy Monday.
The Sierra Club, meanwhile, announced it was going up with a radio ad blasting Lincoln for her effort to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases.
The progressive Netroots, for its part, has embraced Halter, with Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas writing, “Bill Halter will rescue the Democratic establishment from itself and help us hold a seat Lincoln is guaranteed to lose.” Firedoglake blogger Jane Hamsher prominently featured Halter in fundraising appeals on her site and blasted Lincoln as a “corporatist.”
For liberals, discouraged over the inability to push through a sufficiently progressive agenda in President Barack Obama’s first year in office, the opportunity to take down Lincoln, a two-term incumbent who has opposed high-profile items ranging from cap and trade to the public option for health reform, is proving to be irresistible.
Boy, this is where liberals and progressives split because most progressives are realists whereas their liberal counterparts are more idealistic about partisanship. The Arkansas Democrats are mostly moderate to conservative group of people that would in political vernacular be considered
centrists, so the forcing the hand of the people in a state that has little political shifting over the years due to explosive population growth and ethnic diversity compared to say North Carolina, Georgia, or Florida is a recipe for disaster. The idiocy of trying to force Democrat out of office over something like that will prove quite fatal in the long run. Ar-kansas isn't exactly a progressive state at all, and the idea of getting all these liberalized groups interfering with the Democratic primary reeks of trouble down the line if Bill Halter is to win. I've been hearing for years that the Arkansas Republican Party has been bloodthirsty to get a conservative Republican in the U.S. Senate from their state and the liberals have made it very possible this year. I've learned to "lee-bee-it-bee",
let it be, let it be, about Blanche because she would play her own self out (
just like Evan Buh-Bayh). However, the input of those like moveon.org and AFL-CIO will just fire up the rural, conservative white base to go for the Republicans in the end which would mean no more Democratic-dominant Senatorial delegation.
I'm one of those who say if you can't find a moderate to run in a mostly conservative state like Arkansas, then leave it the hell alone...
