Arkansas’ senior U.S. Senator, Blanche Lincoln, is the new-age model of a poor little rich girl.
She is a two-term Democratic Senator subject to reelection this November to one of the most prized and coveted offices in the country. She is the newly-named chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee in a largely agricultural state. She has tried to please everybody, to the point of appearing not to be decisive or willing to take a stand about anything.
She has over $5 million in the bank in a profession in which money is almost everything in getting elected. Almost – but not absolutely – everything.
Money cannot always overcome a widespread grass-roots feeling that it is time for a change. Blanche knows – or should know – this. She certainly knows that there are a lot of people in Arkansas with a grass-roots gut feeling that her time has come to leave the Senate.
Blanche is obviously fearful and running scared, and she has good reason for doing so. The results of a poll issued this week by Public Policy show that 62 percent of voters in Arkansas disapprove of her performance.
In a hypothetical race between Lincoln and Republican U.S. Representative John Boozman, the poll shows Boozman winning (at least at this moment in time) by a margin of 56 percent to 33 percent. Among independent voters – of whom there are an increasing number in this age of discontent with both major political parties – the margin was an even larger 66 percent to 20 percent. And Boozman hasn’t even announced that he is running for the Republican nomination to Blanche’s Senate seat, although that announcement is expected this weekend.
As if that weren’t enough, there are currently nine announced candidates for that Republican nomination. Although some of those people are not to be taken seriously, whenever that many of the opposition political party think that the incumbent is weak enough to be defeated, that incumbent is in trouble.
Lincoln’s problems are self-inflicted and have been the subject of an earlier article (“Sen. Lincoln On The Horns of A Dilemma,” Sun-Times, Nov. 27, 2009), the thrust of which was that she openly resists taking positions on issues, and when she does, she conditions her position with so many reservations and caveats that it is difficult to tell what her position really is. This waffling makes her appear unprincipled, has the effect of alienating everyone involved.
The on-going and never-ending national argument over health care was a prime example of this flaw, made worse by Lincoln’s being the last person in the Senate to announce how she would vote, thereby focusing national attention on her decision, which was to vote to cut off debate, but with the reservation that she may not vote for the health-care bill itself, and if she did, it would have to be without the “public option,” et cetera, et cetera.
One might think that Sen. Lincoln’s vote for health-care reform would be natural, since there are almost a half million of her Arkansas constituents who have no health insurance. However, those Arkansans, however numerous, don’t have the organized and loud voices of the Tea Partiers and other conservatives who oppose government benefiting anybody (with the possible exception of themselves).
Consequently, since that time, Sen. Lincoln has been busy attempting to appease the conservatives by being very visible in opposing proposals that she thinks are progressive. In the process, she is further alienating more people who might have otherwise supported her.
An example of this is Lincoln’s eager and almost irrational opposition to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement that it will, in the near future, propose regulations to control certain greenhouse gas emissions, including the ubiquitous carbon dioxide.
Bear in mind that carbon dioxide is one of the major causes of the climate change that the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence shows is occurring on planet Earth; that much of that gas is emitted from man’s activities; and that if we don’t stop or slow those emissions significantly and soon, the Earth’s long-term climate – which is already changing – will change dramatically and in potentially disastrous ways.
Bear in mind also that, in 2007, a majority of the United States Supreme Court – that bastion of environmental radicalism (I’m joking here folks) – found, based on overwhelming scientific evidence in the case of Massachusetts v. EPA, that carbon dioxide emissions from man’s activities on Earth were a cause of global warming. The Court directed the EPA to determine whether that and other such gases were an endangerment to human health and the environment, and if so, to regulate them.
That decision was the driving factor in EPA’s determination to regulate the gases. It took EPA until 2010 to make that determination, and in the meantime, billions of tons of carbon dioxide have been spewed into the Earth’s atmosphere and continue to do so each year. In the meantime, the United States Senate has done nothing about the problem.
Now, in reaction to EPA’s announcement that it will move to regulate greenhouse gases, our Senator Lincoln said that she is concerned that the move “will create burdens on American industry without providing any significant environmental benefits,” and that “I strongly urge EPA to wait for Congress to find a solution.”
Say what? Congress find a solution? When? Apparently when the climate changes so much that Hell freezes over.
Lincoln is co-sponsoring a resolution in the Senate to discourage EPA from
preparing and issuing the regulations. Left to her and the interminable and uncertain reactionary processes of the U.S. Senate, climate change legislation may never occur.
Senator Lincoln has lost the support of people in Arkansas who are concerned about the environment, and justly so, adding to the number of voters in Arkansas who have a gut feeling that it’s her time to go.
(Richard Mays, a Heber Springs attorney and environmentalist, offers a liberal viewpoint on politics and social issues in each Friday’s edition)
