https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFIQ7ERdPI
Mike Stark catches up with Blanche Lincoln in Congress and asks her if she’ll join the Republican filibuster. She has been virtually silent throughout the whole health care debate and Mike does a great job of getting her to say something on the record. What she said of course was nothing.
Stark: Can you see yourself filibustering or joining a filibuster?
Lincoln: I don’t even know what the bill is going to be and I’m going to do what I think is most important for Arkansans and that is to look at the bill, to see if it’s going to be helpful to Arkansans and the country in expanding health care…
She knows what’s going on in this debate and gives a typical non-answer about supporting the public option like many have given up to this point. We at Blue America are running a brand new ad all over her state starting today so we can help her decide that filibustering health care is not in any one’s best interests except the health insurance corporations that she’s taken huge contributions from.
Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post writes:
The squeeze is on for Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) on health care in the form of a new series of ads paid for by the liberal Blue America PAC that cast the Arkansas Democrat as bought and paid for by insurers. “Blanche Lincoln claims to fight for health care reform but whose interests does she really represent,” asks the ad’s narrator before noting that Lincoln has taken more than $2 million in campaign contributions from the health and insurance industries. The narrator concludes the ad by asking viewers to call Lincoln and “demand she allow an up or down vote on the public option.” (This is the fourth ad paid for by Blue America targeting Lincoln this year.)
Polling shows Lincoln, who is up for re-election in 2010, holding relatively slim margins over a series of unknown Republican candidates. Lincoln’s dilemma? How to walk the line between the conservative leanings of the Razorback State — Obama took just 39 percent there in 2009 — and the increasingly vocal and well-funded left within her own party who see the inclusion of a public option as a sine qua non for health care reform.
Her primary is the reason we targeted her originally and it’s worked out very well so far.
Please help us continue running this ad and many more to come and join in on Blue America’s Campaign for Health Care Choice. Donations are much appreciated.
And Digby writes:
Perhaps Lincoln should start worrying just a bit about what will happen if her Democratic base stays home. The numbers aren’t looking all that good for her right now.
She’s between little rock and a hard place but it seems to me that’s easily solved at this point. She should vote for cloture, thus appeasing her base and then she can vote against the bill if she needs to appeal to neanderthals who want people to die quickly.
Believe me, none of her constituents will hold it against her. Most people think cloture is unpasteurized sour cream. And they like it.
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