Guess What Blanche Lincoln Has Been Up To To Make Your Life Worse Since Being Kicked Out Of The Senate?

John Boozman (R-AR) isn't a better senator than Blanche Lincoln was. When she was a congresswoman and then a senator she was generally rated an "F." Boozman is actually worse, although when you get down that low, there's no grade worse than an "F." There's no such thing as an "F-minus" or a "G." Boozman's ProgressivePunch score since he replaced Lincoln is a ridiculous 3.16 (out of 100) and for the current year, he scores a zero. He's generally dismissed as an ineffective backbencher with no influence whatsoever. No one cares what he has to say on the Science Committee or the Agriculture Committee and his role as the ranking Republican on the Subcommittee on Green Jobs and the New Economy (part of the Environment Committee) is to obstruct progress. One senator told me that "unless he's talking about optometry, he doesn't have much credibility on anything. He's a pretty lazy guy and just goes along with his leadership. He's good on issues that relate to eye health... If we ever win that seat back, he could go back to being an optometrist." That isn't likely, though. The Democrats aren't going to take back that seat-- even with Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket in 2016 when Boozman has to next face the voters. And if he does leave office, he'll probably do exactly what Blanche Lincoln did-- whore himself out as a lobbyist. It's what virtually all corrupt conservatives do after their time in Congress is up.

The reason a conservative numbskull like Boozman isn't much of a downgrade from Blanche Lincoln is because she was one of the two or three most Republican Democrats in the Senate. She was always agitating for more conservative, even reactionary, policies inside the caucus and always undermining progressive initiatives in committee (and especially when she was chair of the Agriculture Committee). She was a spokesperson for Big Business and for the wealthy within the Democratic caucus. And that's what she still is-- only as a slimy K Street lobbyist. In the Senate she was always referred to as the Senator from WalMart. She still works for them, now officially as a lobbyist. She also works for other retail groups and special interests looking for special treatment in the Senate-- and a way to plunder American taxpayers. One of her latest clients is the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), which hired her to help them get out of having to obey regulations that put the good of society ahead of greed and avarice. She's heading up their anti-regulatory Small Businesses for Sensible Regulations project. Who needs a Republican when Blanche is still creeping around the Beltway? Her goal is to make sure Business has as much say as possible in the process.

Last cycle, the lobbying firm she works for, Alston & Bird, handed out $495,617 in legalistic bribes to congressional campaigns, including $30,000 each to the DCCC, NRCC, DSCC and NRSC. As far as individual politicians, they gave over twice as much to House Republicans as to House Democrats and over twice as much to Senate Democrats as to Senate Republicans. They know who makes the rules in each body. Many of their biggest investments were wasted as their most favored corrupt politicians were defeated, like Allen West (R-FL) and Charlie Bass (R-NH) who they gave $10,000 each. Other big losers they backed-- all conservatives of course-- were Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Robert Dold (R-IL), Shelley Berkley (D-NV), and Cliff Stearns (R-FL). And, needless to say, they handed out checks to corrupt party leaders like John Boehner (R-OH), Eric Cantor (R-VA), Paul Ryan (R-WI), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Joe Crowley (D-NY) and Miss McConnell (R-KY).

In a post she penned for HuffPo earlier this month, Lincoln claimed her employers are "the quiet engine of our economy." Disgracefully, HuffPo didn't identify her as a lobbyist, just as the head of a "coalition," It's My Business, "giving a voice to the millions of people who have chosen to be entrepreneurs and have the opportunity to build their own businesses." Not a word about how much she's being paid to or by whom. Shouldn't we expect more from Huffington Post, even if they are part of AOL? Meanwhile paid whores like Lincoln are free to come onto their pages and talk about the government "targeting," investigating and prosecuting these quiet engines of our economy. Pure propaganda:

Throughout my career, I have been a staunch proponent for small businesses and entrepreneurs and I fought hard for their rights during my time serving Arkansas in the U.S. Senate. Their contributions to virtually every aspect of our economy simply cannot be overlooked.

It's My Business is carrying that same torch today. We are committed to protecting the right of independent contractors to choose a way of life that works best for them, and the right of businessmen and women to pursue a business model that provides lifestyle flexibility for them and their families and creates jobs and competitiveness for America.

But we can't do it alone. We are asking you to get engaged and take a stand, too. Tell your elected state and federal bureaucrats to stop their attacks on independent contractors. They are the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit in this country, not to mention a powerful engine driving our economic recovery. They deserve our protection. This country can't afford to let them down.

Yesterday, The Hill pointed out that "[t]here are several bills now pending before Congress that would overhaul the rulemaking system, ranging from measures that would give lawmakers the power to veto major rules to a push to limit the regulatory authority of certain agencies." Lincoln is worried these Republican measures may not pass and she's hoping Obama will institute some of things her employers want even if Congress does try standing up for the public good and insists there's a "frequent disconnect between regulators and the people who must comply with the rules they write." Business always wants to dictate the rules under which they operate. That's why they pay sleazy people like Blanche Lincoln such huge salaries.

Blanche Lincoln's Back In Action-- Working With Jon Kyl To Make Sure The Wealthiest Americans Become Much, Much Wealthier

Yesterday one of Blanche Lincoln's staffers penned a press release kind of thing for HuffPo under her name, Saving Our Children. She sounds very concerned:

Hunger and obesity. It might seem odd to find these epidemics mentioned together, but they are two of the greatest threats to the health of America's children and the future of our nation... Childhood hunger and obesity are problems known all too well in my home state of Arkansas. A recent Feeding America report found our state to have the highest rate of childhood hunger in the country at nearly 25 percent. That's one in four children living in hunger.

Another report found 20 percent of Arkansas children to be obese, the seventh highest rate in the country.

As Chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, I have authored the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which addresses these two threats by making strong improvements to our federal child nutrition programs. Funding authorization for these programs expires in 78 days.

Children who are hungry or obese will face learning challenges and lifelong health problems. And their poor health will add significant cost to our health care system and a significant cost to our nation's future economic security.

Fortunately, hunger is a disease for which we have the cure. And we know healthier meals are part of the solution to reverse the growing epidemic of childhood obesity.

Jill Richardson, one of the country's foremost progressive food policy experts-- and author of Recipe For America: Why Our Food System Is Broken And What We Can Do To Fix It-- doesn't see the problem quite the same way Lincoln does. Jill is delighted that Lincoln pressed forward with the bill that her progressive predecessor as Agriculture Committee chair worked on for so long but points out that "both the Senate and House bills drastically underfund child nutrition programs like school lunch (by tens of billions of dollars), but the Senate bill is FAR worse than the House bill, giving only a tad over half as much money as the House bill does ($4.5 billion over 10 years compared with $8 billion over 10 years). Last, under PAYGO rules, both the Senate and the House committees need to pay for the extra money they spend on school lunch. The House is still exploring options for where this money will come from. Dennis Kucinich, for example, has offered a measure that would remove a subsidy for marketing junk foods to kids and use that money to pay for school lunch. But Lincoln, lovely lady that she is, looked around for a program she thought had some money to cut and took it out of a perennially underfunded agriculture conservation program... The school lunch bill is actually great in terms of expanding the number of kids who get fed. But it does nothing to improve the food. So, in essence, the bill says 'Here kids, we care enough to keep you from starving, but not enough to keep you from getting diabetes, heart disease, or cancer'."

She may not be writing self-promoting pieces for HuffPo about it-- I wonder why-- but Blanche's real priority has nothing to do with poor people, children or otherwise. Her actual raison d'être, and what keeps her from any serious action of behalf of the impoverished Arkansas children she wants to appear concerned about, is her work with Jon Kyl on behalf of a few hundred of the wealthiest families in America, i.e., their campaign donors. As Digby mentioned Monday taxes on the rich are un-American. Blanche to the rescue... since it's clear that a few families once paid too much in estate taxes-- at least in their own minds (and hers)-- is what ails America. Blanche and Kyl are working together to pass a "less onerous estate tax" for multimillionaires.

Sens. Blanche Lincoln , D-Ark., and Jon Kyl , R-Ariz., have laid down an important marker in the continued fight over the tax, which expired Dec. 31 but will kick in again next year. Although Republicans and some moderate Democrats [translation: corrupt corporate shills and far right Democrats like Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu] are likely to support their plan, the issue is highly contentious and Democratic leaders have not signaled whether they intend to allow a vote on it.

The Lincoln-Kyl proposal, backed by many business groups, would be more generous to heirs and estate owners than the version favored by the White House and most Democrats.

The House passed a bill last December that would set the estate tax at the parameters in effect in 2009-- a 45 percent top rate, with a $3.5 million per-person exemption.

The Lincoln-Kyl proposal would gradually drop the top estate tax rate to 35 percent, set the per-person exemption at $5 million and index it to inflation.

Under the 2001 tax cut law, which phased out the estate tax over the past decade, the levy will return on Jan. 1, 2011, if Congress does not act by then. The top rate will jump to 55 percent and the per-person exemption will be set at $1 million.

That would be super! And Durbin, Sanders, Merkeley, Franken and other tribunes of working families should filibuster anything that prevents just that from happening. I wonder if Sherrod ever talks to Blanche. He's right in his analysis of what Republicans want to do in this interview last night with Rachel Maddow, but Blanche Lincoln in his own party, has the same mindset as the anti-family GOP zombies.

A thought: Maybe 2010 is an election year in which incumbents get to justify their existence -- if they can

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2010 - Primary Victory for Women
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

This Daily Show clip was offered by washingtonpost.com's Chris Cillizza the other day in a discussion of the conventional wisdom regarding incumbents this year.

"From Plaquemines Parish to Wall Street, we are seeing what happens when government takes too hands-off an approach to private economic actors. Yet the GOP is managing to sell the idea that the big issue in this election should be . . . government spending.

"Professor Obama and his allies ought to be ashamed of this. The cure for malaise is to have a self-confident sense of purpose, and to act boldly in its pursuit."

--E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column today,

"Democrats should show a little pride and purpose"

by Ken

"A weird malaise is haunting the Democratic Party," E. J. Dionne Jr. begins his column today, continuing, "That's a risky word to use, I know." In case you're wondering, no, he doesn't mean "Democratic Party," which in any case would be a risky pair of words. He means "malaise."

It's freighted with bad history and carries unfortunate implications. So let's be clear: President Obama is not Jimmy Carter, not even close. And Obama's speech on Tuesday was nothing like Carter's 1979 "malaise speech," in which Carter never actually used that word. Obama gave a good and sensible speech that was not a home run.

What's odd is that Obama was seen as needing a home run. This is where the Democratic malaise comes in.

Democrats should feel a lot better than they do. They enacted a health-care bill that had been their dream for more than 60 years. They pulled the country out of a terrifying economic spiral. They are on the verge of passing the biggest reform of Wall Street since the New Deal. The public has identified enemies that are typically seen as Republican allies: oil companies and big bankers. And given the Republicans' past policies, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is at least as much their problem as Obama's.

On top of this, the GOP seems to be doing all it can to make itself unelectable, veering far to the right and embracing a Tea Party movement that, at its extremes, preaches the need for revolution. That sounds more like the old New Left than a reinvigorated conservatism. Oh, yes, and can you think of one thing Republicans stand for right now other than cutting spending? Never mind that they are conspicuously vague about what they'd cut.

Yet it is Democrats who are petrified, uncertain and hesitant -- and this was true before the oil spill made matters worse.

I've been thinking about the Incumbent Question since the other day when I got snookered into reading a piece, from Chris Cillizza's "The Fix" blog, which was billed in a washingtonpost.com newsletter as "Incumbents doing better than thought." Since Chris the Fixer has been one of the people peddling the line that 2010 is a year in which incumbents running for reelection might as well simply start packing their stuff now for the long trip back to Palookaville, I mean home, this got my attention. The actual head on the item, however, was "Incumbents Beware! (Or Not)," and it found Chris in his "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" mode, which, come to think of it, is better than his declaring-the-agenda mode.

"Conventional wisdom has cemented that 2010 will be an anti-incumbent year," Chris began, and already we have to call for a timeout. Just a sec, Chris. You're talking as if "conventional wisdom" is somebody else. But aren't you, or don't you aspire to be, "the conventional wisdom"? Isn't that the whole point of "The Fix"? To codify and, where possible, improve, what passes for wisdom Inside the Beltway?

AN ASIDE ON THE "IDEOLOGY" OF JOURNALISTS

I don't suppose you think of it that way, Chris -- you know, that your job is Keeper of the Flame of Orthodoxy. You like to think yourself as some sort of gadly blowing the whistle on the CW.

I'm here to say that, when artfully practiced (and anyone with mainstream-journalism aspirations has to learn to practice this artfully), it's the same damned thing. Fortuitously, in the post of Glenn Greenwald's I quoted from yesterday, "The media's understanding of its role," Glenn Greenwald recommended -- even while noting that he doesn't agree with all of it -- a post by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, "Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press." Professor Rosen thinks he's mostly alone in finding the ideology of journalists "complicated," while most everyone else thinks it's simple, despite the fact that we in the "simple" camp disagree comically on what that simple ideology is. I would argue that it's, er, complicatedly simple, by which I mean that it's all about What's In It for Me, but that's an argument for another day.

Back now to CW gadfly (giggle) Chris C, who appeared on the verge of striking a dagger to the heart of the conventional -- i.e., that they're toast -- regarding incumbents in this election cycle.

Apparently no one told Jon Stewart. The "Comedy Central" host and -- don't fool yourself -- widely influential commentator about all things political took on that CW on his show last week.

Stewart noted that of the 84 incumbents running on Super Duper Tuesday, all but two were re-nominated. One lost -- scandal-tarred Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons -- while a second, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), was forced into a June 22 runoff.

[At this point, Chris introduced the Daily Show clip we saw at the top of this post.]

So, is Stewart right? Do the facts bear out that 2010 is indeed an anti-incumbent year? Or is this storyline much ado about nothing?

Not surprisingly it's not long before Chris has us looking at, well, not so much facts -- even though he actually announces, "Let's look at the facts" -- as comparisons "with historic norms." This is a favorite CW way of creating new CW, making comparisons with historic norms. In fairness, if there wasn't some basis of comparison, how would it be possible to discuss meaningfully whether or not these are more or less perilous times than usual for incumbents? Of course, by the time we're hearing --

In 2008, four House Members (three Republicans, one Democrat) fell in their fights for renomination. Two incumbents each lost in the 2006 and 2004 elections; in 2002 election eight House Members lost in primaries, but five of those defeats came in redistricting races in which two incumbents were forced to face off against one another --

we realize that what's being passed off as "historic norms" is what we've more traditionally called "the incumbent protection racket." Seriously, with 437 seats in the House, and maybe 400 (or whatever the actual number is) of them running for reelection in any given cycle, don't numbers like those tell us that we should be rooting for some meaningful incumbent peril?

But just when you think you've got our Chris, he throws a curve. In this case, he starts looking at factors in particular races that might have affected their outcome! Oh, the perfidy!

So far in 2010, four Senate and House incumbents -- Utah Sen. Bob Bennett (R), Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter (D), Reps. Alan Mollohan (W. Va.) and Parker Griffith (Ala.) -- have lost their bids for re-nomination. Inglis looks to be in serious trouble heading into next week's runoff, and both Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) have real primaries in August.

How do those losses by incumbent compare with historic norms?

On the Senate side, no more than one incumbent has lost a renomination bid since 1980, when four senators lost primaries. That said, it's hard to quantify how much bigger a deal it is for two incumbents to lose rather than one -- assuming both McCain and Bennet pull it out later this year.

In House terms, the defeats of two -- or even three -- incumbents are not historically anomalous. In 2008, four House Members (three Republicans, one Democrat) fell in their fights for renomination. Two incumbents each lost in the 2006 and 2004 elections; in 2002 election eight House Members lost in primaries, but five of those defeats came in redistricting races in which two incumbents were forced to face off against one another.

And, looked at individually, the four incumbent losses so far this cycle could easily be explained as exceptions, not rules. Both Specter and Griffith had switched parties -- a political no-no in almost any election cycle -- and were facing voters for the first time. Bennett was victimized by the unique Utah nominating process in which roughly 3,500 of the most conservative of the most conservative voters decide the nominee. Mollohan had been beset by ethical problems (or the rumor of them) for years and didn't help himself by running a 1980s-style campaign 30 years too late.

Eventually Chris arrives, as deep down you always knew he would, at a proposed new piece of CW:

Given all of that, is the reasonable conclusion that the anti-incumbent narrative is simply wrong or, at best, exaggerated?

Before you nod your head "yes," it's important to look at national polling for context. And, national polling suggests that voters are in a genuine "throw the bums out" sort of mood.

In the June Washington Post/ABC poll, just 29 percent of those tested said they planned to reelect their member of Congress, while 60 percent said they wanted to look around. By comparison, in Post/ABC polling the summer of 1994, nearly four in 10 (38 percent) said they wanted to reelect their own member of Congress.

A May New York Times/CBS News poll paints a similar picture with just nine (NINE!) percent saying members of Congress deserve reelection and 82 percent saying they don't.

Those numbers are startling and, from a political reporter's perspective, hard to ignore. They represent historic -- or near-historic -- levels of voter dissatisfaction. And, they are far from the only data points in surveys that suggest deep distrust with Washington; just 15 percent approved of the job Congress was doing in the Post/ABC survey, while seven in 10 said they were either "dissatisfied" or "angry" at Washington in the CBS/New York Times poll.

So, while the anti-incumbent storyline looks to be overblown (at least slightly) in terms of the actual number of incumbents who have been defeated to date, the national atmospherics suggest real unrest directed at Washington.

The best way to view the 2010 election may then be as anti-Washington rather than anti-incumbent. Candidates with the perceived support of the party in the nation's capital have fallen in considerable numbers -- Trey Grayson in Kentucky, Sue Lowden in Nevada, Artur Davis in Alabama, to name a few -- as they, wrongly, assumed the establishment could save them.

It can't. And that is the lesson of the primary season so far.

Now to whom, one wonders, is any of this supposed to be news? Was it really necessary to launch an investivative probe to ascertain the "context" that the country is in a surly and anxious state of mind? (If David Broder hasn't yet launched one of his famous Outside the Beltway expeditions -- to a tavern or coffee shop somewhere in America's Heartland -- to discover this, surely it's just a matter of time. And it will be news to him too.) Those numbers on popular hostility to incumbents are indeed eye-opening, but where is the "context" that such numbers have been running pretty darned high for at least a couple of decades, and by and large those poll respondents kept voting for those same damned incumbents, who until 2006 were deemed all but invulnerable to electoral challenge, for all sorts of reasons that were engraved in the stone of Conventional Wisdom.

Political scientists usually explained this by opining that by and large folks hated everybody else's incumbent, but not their own. For better or worse, or some of both, that distinction is less operative than it has been, and surely this is a good thing.

Take the case of Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln. Under the rules of the old incumbent protection racket, she should have had clear sailing to renomination. That she could have been vulnerable to mounted so late and in such an improvised way must have come as a pretty rude shock to her, not to mention certain blabbermouth senior White House officials. But really, is it such a surprise that Lincoln became vulnerable near the end of a congressional session in which she dropped any pretense of being anything other than a 100-percent-hired whore of corporate interests?

Of course in the end she learned to make the right sort of noises about being the mighty protector of Arkansas voters' interests, and since the Infotainment News Media had no interest in providing those voters with information about, for example, all that cash the greedy sleazebag has been shoveling in from the masters whose interests she proceeded, coincidentally, to champion so loyally on the Senate floor -- and she got plenty of cover from the administration she had often sorely tried and from the Clintons, who may not have been Village favorites when they were in the White House but have since learned admirably how to play that game. The Village closed ranks for one of their own, and it doesn't seem to have mattered to those people that it has almost cost the Democratic Party, whose interests the Village Democrats claim to put above all others, that Senate seat.

(As I'm sure you've heard, the latest numbers, admittedly from the highly suspect pollster-player Scott Rasmussen, have Madame Blanche trailing her November opponent, GOP Rep. John Boozman, 61 percent to 32. That's a margin that seems to me to exceed even the most outrageous whorish-pollster bias. The opponent she so narrowly defeated, Bill Halter, might at least have made a race of it.)

Maybe in the end we've got a situation that a few years ago most of us would have considered something of a goal: an electorate to which incumbents have to justify their existence if they want to be reelected.

As it happens, E. J. Dionne Jr. doesn't think all those Democrats running around like panicky chickens without heads need to be so panicky. The centerpiece of his argument is the recently released poll done for National Public Radio by the Democratic firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republicans at Public Opinion Strategies." The poll found that "in the 70 most competitive House districts, 60 of them held by Democrats . . . the Democrats 'face a daunting environment in 2010.'"

"The results are a wake-up call for Democrats whose losses in the House could well exceed 30 seats," they declared. Two findings convey the whole: "Sixty-two percent of Republicans in Democratic districts describe themselves as very enthusiastic about the upcoming election," compared with only 37 percent of Democrats. And: "By 57 to 37 percent, voters in these 60 Democratic seats believe that President Obama's economic policies have produced record deficits while failing to slow job losses."

Paranoia is striking deep among Democrats, and this poll will only aggravate the disorder. In those competitive districts, Democratic incumbents will be tempted to hunker down, distance themselves from the president, urge their leaders to be cautious and run for the hills to seek refuge from a looming Republican wave.

But the numbers in the NPR survey are so bad that Democrats might pause before becoming lemmings. There is something preposterous about how the administration and congressional Democrats have lost every major public argument that they should be winning.

They lost it on a stimulus bill that clearly lifted the economy, as Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, argued persuasively in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. They are losing it on the health-care bill, a big improvement on the current system enacted through a process that made it look like a tar ball on an Alabama beach. They are losing it on the deficit even though it was Republicans who cut taxes twice while the Bush administration was starting two wars.

Obama is often criticized for being too professorial. The irony is that Republicans who have little to say about how to solve the nation's major problems are dominating the country's underlying philosophical narrative.

From Plaquemines Parish to Wall Street, we are seeing what happens when government takes too hands-off an approach to private economic actors. Yet the GOP is managing to sell the idea that the big issue in this election should be . . . government spending.

Professor Obama and his allies ought to be ashamed of this. The cure for malaise is to have a self-confident sense of purpose, and to act boldly in its pursuit.

Now it could be argued that these "accomplishments" of Democrats are overstated, but by whom can that be hoenstly argued? Surely not by Republicans, whose only contribution was to do everything in their power to make each of those policy areas worse, the better to produce what Sen. Jim DeMint so called, in a refreshing burst of honesty, "Obama's waterloo."

A more serious question is how many Democrats can honestly take advantage of the arguments Dionne lays out. To put it another way, how many of those endangered Democrats actually "have a self-confident sense of purpose" and have "act[ed] boldly in its pursuit"? From an electoral standpoint it might not matter, since all that necessarily matters in an election is what you can get enough voters to believe.

Still, and this is yet another reason why I love E. J. Dionne, who seems always to want to be able to believe the best about people, his prescription could be a winner if pols -- emphatically including the administration -- could be induced to adopt it as their own:

"to have a self-confident sense of purpose, and to act boldly in its pursuit."

(Confidential to Master Rahm E.: Making yourself as filthy-rich and powerful as possible is truly not what Mr. Dionne has in mind as "a self-confident sense of purpose," and so I'm afraid that no, you don't get even partial credit for "act[ing] boldly in its pursuit.")

#

Blue America Was Successful Last Tuesday In Arkansas-- And I Don't Mean Symbolically; Our Candidate Won

Just about one year ago to the day, John, Digby, Jacquie and D-Day were scurrying to put together our Blanche Lincoln ad campaign. It was a very homemade affair, the first 3 ads being produced by Digby in John's kitchen. 862 donors contributed $33,753 and Blue America kicked in another $70,000. The average donation was just over $39.00. We ran those ads-- and a fourth one we made later-- all summer, fall and winter and stopped running them as soon as the big labor unions came in with their candidate-- and bankrolls. We didn't stop because we necessarily had anything against Lt. Gov. Bill Halter-- more about that below-- but because we felt our mission was accomplished. We had driven Blanche's approval ratings down drastically, especially in the 8 counties across from Memphis which are crucial for Democrats in statewide races. Our ads let the voters there know that although Blanche Lincoln called herself a Democrat, she was voting with the GOP for the corporate special interests and not in the interest of Arkansas' working families the way Democrats are supposed to. I know, I know; it's an old fashioned supposition (as Blanche started proving again, immediately after she was declared the winner of the runoff).

Anyway within moments of Bill Halter declaring his candidacy I did two things-- added him to the PAC's Send the Democrats A Message They Can Understand page (on which 161 donors contributed $4,673.75 directly to Halter For Senate); and I called his office to invite him to participate in a Blue America live blogging session at Crooks & Liars, which is how we introduce our candidates to our readers and donors. We invited him half a dozen times and got various excuses over the next couple of months. He never came on and never got in the phone either. We never had any idea if he fit any of the Blue America criteria for an endorsement. So we never endorsed him.

Did he believe in campaign finance reform? Was he solid on Choice? How would he stand when it came to corporate special interests vs working families? Afghanistan? Equality for gays? The environment? We never got any answers. Instead I got a call from an old and trusted friend, Lara Bergthold who had worked closely with Halter in the Wes Clark campaign. She told me that as bad as Lincoln is-- and she agreed that Blanche is a nightmare, Halter would be no improvement and, in fact, could be even worse. That gave me pause. Lara worked on a guest post on March 2. On June 7, she was interviewed along the same lines in the NY Times and made it clear that, from her perspective, Halter was no progressive.

Ms. Bergthold, who spent weeks in 2003 working with Mr. Halter on Gen. Wesley K. Clark’s presidential campaign, said Mr. Halter had been among the most conservative voices in the room, even pooh-poohing the importance of meeting with labor unions and other key segments of the Democratic base.

Now, Ms. Bergthold worries that the groups that have poured millions of dollars into his campaign might not know what they are getting. Compared with Mrs. Lincoln, a senator for 12 years, Mr. Halter is a political cipher, with no voting record and several chapters of his history unexamined.

“I don’t like to see him turned into a progressive darling on the national stage when I know him to be something different,” Ms. Bergthold said. “He’s a political opportunist.”

By then Blue America had long made a decision to "root" for Blanche to lose and leave it at that. Instead we saw a real opportunity for progressive governance and we jumped on it. Back when I was first looking for an alternative to Blanche-- and when Halter had personally assured me he would not be running-- virtually everyone I spoke with in the state told me the most progressive voice in state government was a Little Rock senator, Joyce Elliott, but that she would be unlikely to go up against Blanche and the Democratic Machine, something that would end a promising political career.

And then moderate Democrat Vic Snyder, the congressman who represented the 2nd CD, which includes all of Joyce's senatorial district, suddenly decided to retire. Every progressive in the state wanted to see her run, although there was almost immediately a crowded field-- of conservative-leaning white men. In January Blue Arkansas really introduced Joyce to outsiders like myself, calling her the "the one candidate that really thrills me":

Senator Elliott is an excellent representative and a great progressive, but there are reasons to question her ability to win this district, and we all know why-race and ideology. The second was President Obama’s best district in Arkansas, but he still lost it by nine points. There is of course deep seated racism and reluctance to vote for African American candidates in some segments of Arkansas, even among so called Democrats, and the Republicans have a top tier recruit in Tim Griffin. Then you have to factor in sourness towards Obama and national Democrats found heavily in Arkansas, a product of both the President’s indifference to connecting to voters here and of our Democratic establishment refusal to respect voters by talking to them like adults and their cowardly refusal to stand up to the teabaggers and the rest of the rabid right. It’s all plenty of reason to give any of us pause when considering such a promising progressive as Elliott.

In the end Blue Arkansas endorsed her and fought hard for her. She won the first round of the 5-way primary, beating her closest opponent, arch conservative House Speaker Robbie Wills 39.6- 27.9%. Blue America endorsed her immediately, started raising funds for her and had her over to Crooks & Liars for a live session. Wills' campaign was basically to have his surrogates repeat over and over that an African-American could not win in November and that if she were nominated she would be beaten by the execrable Tim Griffin. The scare tactic didn't work and last Tuesday Joyce triumphed decisively, 53.8- 46.2%, over Wills.

If Joyce wins in November she'll be the first Africa American to win a federal election in Arkansas since the Union troops were withdrawn from the state after the Reconstruction period that followed the Civil War. She'll be facing Karl Rove protégé Tim Griffin, the disgraced ex-U.S. Attorney. Please consider contributing what you can towards her campaign.

Blue America's success with Joyce had a great deal to do with the spectacular GOTV operation in Pulaski County by the unions. Unfortunately many of the voters who they got out to vote were listening to Obama and Clinton who had urged them to vote for Blanche. But they voted for Joyce as well. And that success didn't change my opinion one bit that the unions and other Halter backers did the right thing for them-- showing conservative and corrupt corporate Democrats that there is accountability and a price to pay for their perfidy. I bet Ben Nelson got a very clear message from the horrific-- and expensive-- primary and run-off Blanche had to fight. Right after the votes rolled in AFL-CIO activist Amy Dean posted a worthwhile piece at Daily Kos Why Taking on Blanche Lincoln Was the Right Call + Building a Real Progressive Agenda.

Challenges within the primaries allow us to define what it means to be a real Democrat--to insist that the party truly puts the interests of working people first. That's what makes elections like Tuesday's run-off in Arkansas between Bill Halter and incumbent Senator Blanche Lincoln, the victor, so important. Labor and progressive movements got together to target Lincoln because she had opposed the Employee Free Choice Act, helped to block a robust public option in health care reform, and refused to back one of President Obama's key nominees to the National Labor Relations Board.

Conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party states that we need strong majorities in order to pass better public policies in Washington, DC. But the logic of "more" doesn't add up if those people we elect do not provide us with the votes we need. As long as our political strategies ask only that candidates have a "D" behind their names, we'll never get the type of majorities that will take hard stands to confront the power of big business and create real reform.

Going back to the Carter years in the 1970s, we had large Democratic majorities in Congress, yet we saw labor law weakened and the right to collective bargaining eroded. Under Clinton, Democratic majorities gave us NAFTA and more unfair trade. If we don't want history to repeat itself with the current administration, we cannot get wrapped up in the temporary excitement of a given electoral campaign. We need to have the memory, foresight, and strategy to craft something different. That's why we should hope that challenges within the primaries become more standard.

Doing politics differently means two things:

1) having a higher standard of accountability; and

2) judging our success in electoral contests based on a dual bottom line.

Accountability first means being clear about what our agenda is. Strong health care and labor law reforms are key structural changes needed in our economy if we are to rebuild the American middle class. We can't forget these in the next Congress and simply move on to new matters. Rather than waiting for the White House to lead and hoping that candidates follow, we must lead by putting our priorities forward. We don't need friends on issues that are foundational to working people, such as health care, living wages, and making collective bargaining the norm; we need champions.

There have been countless calls from labor and other progressive constituencies for accountability from politicians. Nobody disagrees that elected officials should be made to answer for their votes. But there is not much said about how to make this happen--about what the vehicle for ensuring accountability will be.

The answer is an organized base. None of the progressive lobbies in Washington, DC can hold any elected official accountable without strong, organized, permanent grassroots organization in the home states.

I've sensed a lot of progressives are downheartened the Halter lost. I understand it, but I don't really share the feelings. I would have liked to have seen Blanche lose-- as she probably will in November-- and it probably would have been better to have her lose to a Democrat than to a Republican corporate hack like John Boozman. He'll also oppose healthcare reform; he'll also oppose Employee Free Choice; he'll also oppose fair taxation and push to abolish the Estate Tax; he'll also serve the interests of the 100 wealthiest families and the biggest corporations in America. Meanwhile, if we're lucky, we'll have a proven progressive leader in Joyce Elliott beginning a long fruitful House career.

Perhaps on that same day Tarryl Clark will replace Michele Bachmann, and perhaps Billy Kennedy will replace Virginia Foxx, Ken Calvert could be ousted by Bill Hedrick. And we'll be working to pull off what the DCCC won't even dare to approach-- replacing John Boehner with Justin Coussoule. We have our work cut out for us and we're not going to get anywhere without your support. Last cycle Blue America scored better than any PAC in the nation in terms of bringing home winners-- better than the unions, the environmental groups, the women's groups, etc. And "viability" is far, far from the top of our list of candidate qualifiers. Principles, values and character are what we're looking for. I hope you are too.



Digby Takes It To The Next Level

In a post this afternoon Digby charged down the field-- and scored:

If you don't try, don't support progressive candidates, challenge the establishment, work hard over a long time horizon to help build progressive infrastructure it will never happen. And like all progress it happens in fits and starts, two steps forward, one step back.

It's easy to lose heart and figure there's no point, especially when you try something as big as the Halter campaign, with all the money and institutional clout, and lose. But it seems clear from all historical examples that it takes a while to build a movement, especially one based upon a value system, worldview and set of principles rather than a single issue. It obviously requires long term dedication to education, rhetorical refinement, infrastructure building and patience. Solidarity-- the single most important aspect of movement building, in my opinion-- takes time. I don't think there are any shortcuts. And like most things in life, I would guess that it's important to acknowledge the smaller victories and build upon them.

Joyce Elliott is facing one of the most disreputable GOP dirty tricksters in the business, Tim Griffin a truly malevolent piece of work who made his bones manufacturing lies about Al Gore in the 2000 election and went on to be the poster boy for Karl Rove's despoiling of the US Attorneys office during the Bush administration. There is no person more unworthy of being in the United States congress. And at least partly because of a netroots and union push in the state, we have a very accomplished progressive running against him in the most progressive district in Arkansas. And he can be beaten.

So, despite the fact that the Halter campaign didn't go the distance, never think it wasn't worth it. If Joyce Elliott becomes the next congressional representative from the 2nd district, every penny will have been well spent, no matter what the petulant complainers from the White House said. She could very well be the one that ends up succeeding Blanche Lincoln a few years from now. That's what playing the long game is all about.

You can donate to Joyce's campaign here.

Obama Should Flush Jim Messina And Rahm Emanuel Down The Toilet

The tall douchebag talking to Emanuel is Messina

Last night in the midst of all the election returns a breathless post by the least reliable of all the Inside the Beltway "reporters," Politico's Ben Smith, someone who personal experience has shown me is more than willing to make up his own facts to move forward an agenda, roiled the blogosphere. According to Smith, "a senior White House official" called him as the returns were rolling in "with a very pointed message for the administration's sometime allies in organized labor, who invested heavily in beating Blanche Lincoln, Obama's candidate, in Arkansas."

"Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."

Presumably this would be Rahm or the equally sleazy and undisciplined Jim Messina, though not likely to be White House Political Director Patrick Gaspard, a longtime labor activist with SEIU and a more sober personality than either Emanuel or Messina.

After it hit the wires, a friend of mine at the AFL-CIO exploded:

The major labor federation AFL-CIO took sharp objection tonight to a White House official's assessment that they'd "flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet" in the "pointless exercise" of supporting the failed bid of Bill Halter to unseat Sen. Blanche Lincoln.

"If that's their take on this, then they severely misread how the electorate feels and how we're running our political program. When we say we're only going to support elected officials who support our issues," said AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale. "When they say we should have targeted our money among some key house races among Blue Dog Democrats-- that ain't happening." 

"Labor isn't an arm of the Democratic Party," Vale said. "It exists to support working families. And that's what we said tonight, and that's what we're gong to keep saying."

We don't always agree with labor unions on their political choices; they're far too tolerant of Blue Dogs who work against the interests of their own members. The Georgia state AFL-CIO, for example-- for whatever reason-- just endorsed reactionary John Barrow. But the principles Eddie Vale expressed are very similar to the feelings at Blue America.

Blanche is very unlikely to win in November, and most Democratic observers felt Bill Halter would have made a much better general election candidate, so Messina or Emanuel is probably certifiably insane. Neither is capable of serving Obama well. Markos' tweets and summation this morning brought up some interesting points they ought to consider before they claim labor flushed anything down the toilet.

• The GOP establishment tries to nominate electable candidates, and gets sabotaged by the teabaggers. We're trying to nominate electable candidates, and we get sabotaged by the Democratic Party establishment. We won in Pennsylvania, lost in Arkansas. You can't win them all. But make no mistake-- we made the politically smart move.

• Unfortunately, the smart political move lost. So say hello to Sen. John Boozman, the next senator from the great state of Arkansas. It's the political reality. No need to sugarcoat it.

• How much do you think the Chamber of Commerce and its corporatist allies will spend on behalf of Blanche Lincoln through the fall? Zero. Suddenly, you're going to see Lincoln quite friendless.

• Those evil "out of state" unions and progressive groups sure won't lift a finger to help her. The only question is how much the DSCC wastes on the losing effort.

• I've long since quit being impressed by moral victories. In this case, we forced Blanche to dramatically improve the financial reform bill, and it may be too late to strip out her derivatives reform language. And we delivered the kind of pain that no other incumbent wants to suffer. So congressional Democrats have two options -- they can either shape up and be spared primary pain (I'd be happy focusing solely on Joe Lieberman in 2012), or they can be Blanched.

As I explained earlier, this is a time to fight harder and smarter. Before we get to the Republican conservatives, we still have a handful of Blue Dog conservatives, particularly Jim Matheson (UT), John Barrow (GA) and Dan Boren (OK). And you can find the courageous progressives who are duking it out with them here, at the Blue America BadDogs page.

Say, what if congresscritters did have to split their bribe takings with the folks back home?

Max and Chuck G: Might they and their congressional colleagues be "encouraged" (to put it tactfully) to "give something back" to the folks back home?

by Ken

This morning Howie had a post called "Maybe Louisiana Voters Think That When Their Senators Get Bribes It Somehow Accrues To The Whole State." It may just be the way my mind works, but the idea I first took in from this head was: "Maybe Senators Think That When They Get Bribes It Somehow Accrues To Their Voters." And I was utterly taken by the notion that congresscritters may forget that their constituents don't share in any of the bribe money they collect.

Now I'm wondering, would the system be any better if the bribe money did have to be shared with their constituents?

First let's back up to my initial misapprehension: This seemed to me an almost believable manifestation of Inside the Beltway-ism, where reality is only what happens Inside the Beltway, or perhaps even more locally what happens inside a Beltway Insider's head. As opposed to what happens, for example, in the Gulf of Mexico, which most of them probably couldn't find on a map. Again, I can almost believe in legislators whose sense of self-importance becomes so outsized that they really aren't aware of any separation between their interests (financial interests, just to pick a random example) and their constituents'.

One thing that has fascinated me as Howie has become more directly involved with both congressional candidates and actual live sitting congressmembers, and of course congressional candidates who became congressmembers, is the disconnect from reality that sets in as soon as they become Certifiably Important. Sometimes, for a previously longshot primary contender, it may be after the previously hopeless underdog becomes the official candidate. Almost without exception there's a transformation, of varying degrees of inclusivity, when a onetime insurgent is certified The Winner, the "in," in the general election.

As I hear it second-hand, the differences turn up quickly in relations with staff members, and it isn't always immediately clear how much of this is traceable to the candidate-turned-electee. But suddenly the staffer who the week before was begging for time and attention doesn't have time for you. The online chat he would have run over his grandma for a month before? Now we have to check his schedule, it's so tight, and you know that that schedule check is never going to be completed, which no doubt explains why they never get back to you.

Especially once the Washington staff is assembled, you often find you're dealing with literally different people. Often with the "assistance" of their party's congressional machinery (which often comes, curiously, from the party's congressional campaign people, underscoring the frequent observation that today's congressmembers are in permanent campaign mode), formerly insurgent candidates lustfully mainstream themselves, and that often includes hiring staff members, indeed often the senior-most staff members, who've done it before, and so are familiar with the Way Congress (or Washington) Works, aka Inside the Beltway-ism. And the new gatekeeper understands that he/she is a gatekeeper only in the sense of being mostly a gate-blocker.

Remember, we're talking here about a not-even or barely even first-term congressmember. At this stage of relative Beltway naïveté, I can almost believe in this state of mind, where the member begins to blur his/her own interests with those of his/her constituents. Still, these days it takes a really special person, or else a really oblivious one, to retain that degree of naïveté even as far as the day of his/her swearing in. Now imagine that same member down the road a ways, having been through three or four election cycles and begun to acquire a bit of seniority, some better committee assignments, maybe a subcommittee chairmanship. And a lot more interest from the jackals of K Street.

Imagine then a U.S. senator from a typical state -- by which I mean not a state that has more senators than House members, or even a state with equal numbers. Now we're talking about the kind of pol who's really had to sweat his/her way up the political ladder to land one of those seats in the 100 Club. I still love the idea of a Max Baucus or Chuck Grassley or Blanche Lincoln or David Vitter thinking that his/her interests are indistinguishable from those of his/her voters. I can even buy it where we're talking just about money that is legitimately intended for campaign spending, because I can believe that such people really believe they are providing their voters with the privilege of being represented by theirs truly.

But that accounts for a terribly small portion of the loot they extract from the money-givers. Now I'm prepared to believe that people like Max Baucus and Chuck G (not to be confused with Chuck S, though for our immediate purposes there's no signficant difference except that we've been talking about Chuck G's particular appeal to bribers as either chairman or ranking minority member of the SFC) and Blanche and the Diaperman don't carry around in their hands a to-the-dollar accounting of who's given them how much money. I'm not saying for sure they don't, just that I'm prepared to believe they don't. Nevertheless, I think they have at all times a powerful and powerfully accurate ongoing sense of their answer to the old Kojak question, "Who loves ya, baby?"

So what would happen if a system whereby all that cash donated by all those good-government benefactors had to be divvied up with the folks back home? Think just of the loot the insurance industry poured into the health care battle. This would do more than anything I can think of to align the interests of members with their constituents, although I suppose it would actually work vice versa, aligning constituents' interests with members', but at least we might have "representatives" acting in the interests of their constituents.

And imagine the stimulative effect on the economy. Of course it's already having some stimulative effect, wherever the money-catchers currently spend their hauls. This way, though, at least that portion of the take would be pumped directly into the members' home districts or states.

I admit I don't have all the details worked out. Like the proportions of the split. My first instinct is 50-50. If the people of the member's CD or state are sporting enough to endow Mr./Ms. X with a seat on the K Street "receiving committee," shouldn't they be entitled to a decent share of the loot?

The manner of determining the distribution list would also need to be worked out. I assume that confidentiality of census records would rule out using them to determine who shares in the wealth. All registered voters? All voters who actually participated in the election of Mr./Ms. X? And somebody's bound to suggest that the money should only go to people who voted for Mr./Ms. X, that the other people in his/her CD or state didn't even want him/her there, or at least not enough to trouble themselves to actually vote. Why should they profit?

I suppose the counterargument would be that the K Street briber is greasing Mr./Ms. X on behalf of his/her constituents, though this reasoning breaks down somewhat in the cases of those lions of the Senate Finance Committee, Senators Baucus and Grassley. Churlish as it is to suggest that their K Street hauls are less expressions of affection and support for the good people of Montana and Iowa than quid-pro-greenbacks for the big cheeses of the Senate committee through which most of the money the government spends passes, there are cynical people who would make just that suggestion.

(In some of the above suggested distribution plans there are also issues involving the fabled sanctity of the American ballot box. How would a prospective citizen payee prove that he/she voted, or that he/she voted for the winner? Nevertheless, with any reasonable amount of cash on the line, I'm thinking that the sanctity of the secret ballot might prove negotiable.)

Naturally the question arises as to why sitting House and Senate members would accept this new system of having to part with, for the sake of argument, half their bribe money. Many of the poor dears undoubtedly think they've earned that money. In all too many cases, this can be easily documented. I like to think, though, that they can be helped to understand that bribery isn't just a potential social faux pas (which may not even register a jolt, given the social circles they travel in), but is also unethical and illegal. Sure, the illegality is tough to prove, but what would happen if you indicated to the dears a willingness to try? There's the potential for the lawyers' fees alone to eat up all that money they've so arduously wheedled out of their donors.

There isn't much that Max and Chuck G and Blanche and the Diaperman and their kind can do about the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf, and significantly less still that they're prepared to do. Under my plan at least the beleaguered citizens of the Gulf states would get something out of their representatives in Congress.

#

Say, Bill Clinton, is there anything that embarrasses a "centrist" Democrat?

Bill 'n' Blanche: You mean being a 

corporate whore is, like, a bad thing?

by Ken

Over the weekend I found myself in extended conversation of the sort I usually try to avoid -- with a fellow citizen of strongly held opinions backed by broad but in many areas exceedingly sketchy knowledge. It was a social occasion, and for once I didn't want to appear antisocial, or at least not excessively antisocial, and the citizen was the husband of someone whose feelings I truly didn't want to bruise. And of course once I got into it, the old need . . . well, not to be right, but not to be steamrolled by blatant sophistry, kicked in.

The citizen wasn't so much conservative as contrarian, although it struck me as interesting that his contrariness rarely seemed to apply to areas of the conventional wisdom that I find most deserving of contradicting. And so, for example, he offered up the Obama administration's difficulty in closing the prison at Guantanamo as a demonstration of its awakening to the reality that governing is more difficult than the campaign's attacks on the Bush administration suggested.

Now of course as a DWT reader you probably know that my response was, "What attacks?" And I pointed out what a wasted opportunity both the campaign and the administration-to-date had been in the matter of frontally attacking the criminally misguided ideology and policies of the Right. In the matter of Guantanamo, I agreed that yes, closing the prison involves difficulties, but difficulties are what you surmount if you want to get something done, and in this administration's case, on a whole range of Bush regime policies it's hard to find much trace of a wish to seriously change course. It's not only difficult but pretty much impossible to, say, shut down the Guantanamo internment camp if you're not really trying.

We see it all over the place, as Obama's people wage even more relentless campaigns against immigrants and whistle-blowers and any other would-be disturbers of the conventional right-wing order. (As many commentators have pointed out, the president's famous desire to look forward rather than backward applies only to the organized-crime wave that was the Bush regime.

Just the other day, for example, Glenn Greenwald, who's been doing a bang-up job tracking the continuity between Bush and Obama administration policies, in writing about the shocking and fundamentally un-American proviso that popped out of the Defense Department budget bill opening lawyers who defend terror detainees to possible recriminations just for doing their job, noted:

This is yet another example of repellent, fear-based policies that could not be (or at least were not) enacted during the Bush years yet are finding new life under Democratic Party rule.  Recall that Bush Pentagon official Cully Stimson was actually forced to apologize for suggesting that lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees were engaged in disloyal and improper acts.  Yet with the Democrats in control of Washington, a provision grounded in exactly that rotted premise has now been unanimously reported out of a major House Committee.

When you can get the attention of someone in the administration or the congressional leadership to address such points, what you usually get, mixed in with fibbing about the facts, is excuses -- we don't have the votes, we have to be careful, the country isn't with us, etc. Rarely do they have the honesty to say, Well, we just don't wanna.

It is, of course, the standard excuse for all those Republican-style candidates the Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress have been trying so hard to stuff their caucuses with. For a while you can accept the excuse that they need people who are "electable" in those districts and states. But as Howie has had such frequent occasion to point out, their right-wing "centrists" aren't necessarily more electable than authentic Democrats they routinely muscle out of the nominating process, candidates who might actually give troubled voters something to vote for.

In this election cycle even the pretense of an "electability" factor has more and more been dropped, as the official party organs increasingly find themselves stumping for candidates who (probably fortunately) couldn't beat any candidate unencumbered by a sex scandal. It becomes increasingly clear that the party hacks support right-wing "Democrats" because they're the people they're most comfortable with -- people who will fit right into the Beltway's kabuki politics, where "order" requires giving highest consideration to the people who pay for it.

Which brings me to Bill Clinton. Now I don't imagine there are many progressives who still nurture illusions about our Bill's politics, though I think there are still a lot of people who haven't yet figured out that Hillary isn't much more progressive. But it's Bill who's suddenly in the news, and you have to wonder if he has the sense to be embarrassed.

I still say that, as a matter of law, the story of what inducement the White House may have offered Joe Sestak to clear Arlen Specter's path to reelection is a nonstory. It was a legitimate political issue in the Democratic primary, because Pennsylvania Democratic voters have a right to know and consider how their elected officials are attempting to manipulate the selection of candidates. But there's no issue of a crime here; that's just a demented fabrication of right-wing doodybrains who haven't told their day's quotient of lies.

If this were the worst thing that had been done by the Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, or Bush II administrations, that would represent an ethical standard about a trillion times higher than reality. In American politics, and I suspect everybody else's, finding a nice job for somebody you want out of the way of your preferred candidate is a more or less daily occurrence.

As an issue of governance, however, it is an issue. And by gosh, now that the actual story has come out, there's Bill Clinton "carrying the water" (as Fat Rush would say) for none other than his old attack dog Master Rahm Emanuel.

Meanwhile where was our Bill today? In Arkansas, addressing the question, "Can Bill Clinton Save Blanche Lincoln?" I'm assuming he said something like: "Now a lot of people are saying our Blanche is just a corporate whore. But they say it like that's a bad thing."

Say good night, Bill.


SPEAKING OF THE GREAT PA. SENATE "SCANDAL"

Digby had a great post, "The Scandal Monster's Deadly Toxin," taking off from the earnest proffers from hither and yon as to what Joe Sestak and the White House may have to do "in order to put a stop to this non-scandal once and for all." She acknowledges that "they may be right" --

But here's the thing. None of that will do any good. There is no winning with these noise machine pseudo-scandals. They have an alternate media structure that is designed to stoke scandal fever . . .

There's a wonderfully Digbyesque description of the process of issuing outraged demands that can't ever be met, leading to the next set of outraged demands, and the next.

With every impossible requirement that isn't met, the press will become more convinced that the person must be hiding something, is too hot to handle and will eventually agree that he has to step down or quit the race because "the scandal" is devouring him.

Although eventually "an article or a book will be written explaining that there was never anything to the charges, that the whole thing turned into a feeding frenzy," it will still be the pol's fault for not getting "out front," or simply "for failing to be a stronger, better politician." It takes the impenetrable hide of a Bill Clinton, Digby suggests, "to recognize that they are not going to leave you alone, give yourself up to it and greet each day with the knowledge that this is going to dominate until it either passes or kills you."

#

Many Happy Returns-- Last Night's Primary Results

I tweeted away the night yesterday, starting in Kentucky, where the Blue America candidate, Jack Conway, won a great victory over three conservatives:

*Jack Conway (D)- 226,773 (44.1%)
*Dan Mongiardo (D)- 221,269 (43.0%)
*Rand Paul (R)- 206,159 (58.8%)
*Trey Grayson (R)- 124,238 (35.4%)

The big loser, of course, was Mitch McConnell, who drove poor, old senile Jim Bunning out of the race so he could get his colorless protégé, Trey Grayson into the Senate. With the populist masses of both the right and the left rebelling against the hated Inside-the-Beltway party establishments, McConnell's embrace of Grayson was the kiss of death. Nor did it help that Cheney and especially not John Cornyn also endorsed Grayson. It was an anti-Establishment slaughter from the first Republican precincts counted. Jim DeMint could offer McConnell a formidable challenge to the Senate Republican leadership, especially as the increasingly radicalized Republican grassroots is reminded that what Boehner and Ryan and Cantor did for Wall Street in October 2008-- in terms of forcing Republicans to vote for Bush's no-strings-attached bailout-- McConnell did in the Senate.

And on the Democratic side... well, it was one of those crystal clear choices between a real working family-oriented Democrat (Conway) versus a conservative, anti-Choice, anti-gay, anti-healthcare, corporate-oriented shill (Mongiardo). Although low-information voters in rural counties turned out for Mongiardo, Conway won in traditional Democratic constituencies. In Jefferson County (Louisville) for example, Conway racked up gigantic majorities (50,906, as opposed to Mongiardo's 21,203; Rand Paul won 30,005).

And although the DSCC stayed neutral in Kentucky, they spent tons of money and energy trying to bolster two hopeless incumbents in Pennsylvania and Arkansas. Sestak beat Specter convincingly, 559,131 (53.9%) to 478,245 (46.1%) and the areas where Specter did best-- basically Philly-- are the very areas most likely to swing most easily to Sestak in November. Sestak won every single county in the state with the exceptions of Philadelphia, Lackawanna and Dauphin. Specter immediately congratulated him and vowed to work for his election against Toomey in November. My favorite tweet of the evening was from Greg Sargent:


Early in the evening I predicted an anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-healthcare corrupt conservative will win in the PA-12 special election to replace Jack Murtha. I couldn't have lost that bet since both the guy in the blue jersey and the guy in the red jersey both fit that description. The one in the blue jersey won and DCCC nitwit Debbie Wasserman Schultz was all puffed up with pride:


The House race I was most interested in though, was in Arkansas, specifically AR-02, the Little Rock-centered district that moderate Vic Snyder is retiring from. Five candidates vied for the seat and June 8th will see a run-off between the most progressive of the lot, state Senator Joyce Elliott (39.6%) and the most conservative of the lot, House Speaker Robbie Wills (27.9%). The winner of that runoff will face Karl Rove protégé Tim Griffin.

Bill Halter's goal was to hold Blanche Lincoln below 50% and force her into a run-off, which is bound to be an even lower turn-out election, something that will probably help Halter and his energized base against the low-info Blanche supporters. There'll be no run-off in Republicanville where pro-bailout wingnut John Boozman took 52.9% of the vote, despite being hated by the teabaggers. Halter and Lincoln have been see-sawing for the bragging rights to having the plurality but they are clearly going to a June 8 runoff.

So... the Blue America May Primaries page is still open and functioning. At this point Jack Conway and Joe Sestak will need help beating their extreme right Republican opponents, Rand Paul and Pat Toomey, and Bill Halter and Elaine Marshall will both battle it out against the DSCC and their corporate-friendly opponents, Blanche Lincoln and Cal Cunningham. Please do what you can to help.



UPDATE: Sane Republicans In Kentucky Won't Support Teabagger Candidate GOP Nominated

Republicans may be crazy but they're not that crazy. And 43% of Trey Grayson supporters say they won't be voting for far right sociopath Rand Paul in November.

The likely Rand Paul victory in the Kentucky Republican primary today should give Democrats a very good chance of winning in the fall because supporters of Trey Grayson, Paul's main opponent, really don't like him.

Some primaries play out in such a way that party loyalists view several of the candidates favorably and just choose the one they like best. That was very much the case with the recent Democratic contest in North Carolina. But in Kentucky we find that Paul's supporters hate Grayson, and that even more Grayson's supporters hate Paul.

53% of likely Grayson voters for today have an unfavorable opinion of Paul to only 23% with a positive opinion of him. More importantly though just 40% of Grayson voters say they'll support Paul in the general election if he wins the Republican nomination with 43% explicitly saying they will not.

Happy Primary Day!

Obama taped a very effective spot for reactionary Blue Dog and anti-healthcare fanatic John Barrow in 2008-- a tape that is believed to have been decisive in the conservative Georgian's win over progressive state Senator Regina Thomas-- so why should anyone be surprised that Obama taped a similar message for conservative Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln in a last minute push to help her overcome a surging Bill Halter. Ironically, Halter can stop Republican bailout supporter John Boozman in November; Lincoln wouldn't have a chance.

This call illustrates the degree to which this race has put Obama in direct confrontation with the big unions, who are among his most powerful backers. After all, despite Obama's praise of Lincoln's healthcare record, this is one key reason why labor is working so hard to defeat her. She voted against the reconciliation package and opposed the public option. (She did support the final bill, which did bar discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions.)

Lincoln, of course, also came out against the Employee Free Choice Act, labor's top priority.

And finally, Obama is declaring her to be on the side of workers, even though Lincoln has sought to paint Halter's labor backing as a negative, suggesting that his support from "Washington D.C. unions" is a sign that he's a tool of national liberal groups.

I'm more surprised that the White House abandoned the equally unattractive pseudo-Democrat from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter, who Obama has been helping until this past weekend when it became clear that Sestak had all the momentum going into today's vote and that Specter can no longer even make a pretense of hiding his advanced and debilitating senility. Even Specter's biggest advocates, Joe Biden and Ed Rendell, are ready to accept the inevitable. Here again is the clip Ken showed last night of Specter in Erie yesterday unable to figure out who he's running against:



One final indignity for Specter yesterday. All weekend he was telling people that the vote would be close and that it will come down to who does best in the African-American community in Philly. Despite desperate pleas from Specter, Obama is refusing to come campaign for him. And yesterday it became even clearer that he wouldn't be the big winner in the African-American precincts.

To calls of "amen" from one of Tuesday's most critical voting blocs, Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) accepted the endorsement of a dozen African-American clergy members and officials as he barnstormed the state in the campaign's heated final hours.

"Hope's not enough," Sestak said Monday outside New Hope Baptist Church in South Philadelphia. While the city's largest black clergy group has aligned itself with Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) in Tuesday's down-to-the-wire primary, Sestak has targeted Specter's positions from the 28 years the senator was a Republican to try to peel away voters worried about violent crime and jobs programs in the inner city.

Sestak brings with him to every stop in Philadelphia a Specter campaign flier criticizing Sestak for getting an "F" grade from the NRA. Distributed in gun-friendly western Pennsylvania, Sestak is using it as a wedge against Specter in Philadelphia, citing the five-term incumbent's past opposition to the assault weapons ban.

Some African-American clergy cited Specter's role supporting Republican nominees to the Supreme Court-- including Justice Clarence Thomas-- as reasons for opposing him.
Clarence Pemberton Jr., New Hope's pastor, pointed to Specter's 1991 cross-examination of Anita Hill, the law professor who accused Thomas of sexual harassment. "I don't understand how a black woman can vote for him," Pemberton told reporters.

...Sestak made an argument from electability, pointing to polls showing he currently would perform better than Specter against Toomey. "Politically, he will take down the whole ticket," Sestak said in an interview.

State Rep. Tony Payton Jr., 29, a second-term lawmaker, said Sestak's key will be reminding voters, particularly African-Americans, of the contrast between the two candidates' voting records on key domestic policy issues.

"There's a stark comparison there," Payton, who represents North Philadelphia, said.

And grassroots Democrats-- unlike the careerist shills Inside the Beltway-- know that wearing a blue shirt doesn't make someone a Democrat. Your beliefs do or-- in the case of Snarlin' Arlen-- don't.



The differences between Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak are like a chasm. We're counting on Bill Halter being significantly different from Blanche Lincoln as well. And the differences between conservative bigot Dan Mongiardo and Jack Conway... let's face it: Mongiardo has way more in common with Mitch McConnell than he does with Democrats. DWT readers should know by this time we're alreaddy urging our friends in Kentucky to reject conservative Dan Mongiardo and vote for Jack Conway. A little reminder why: