[Moment of triumph for Arkansas progressives- Joyce Elliott beats Robbie Wills]

The U.S. Senate would have been considerably less reactionary-- and less a vehicle for wealthy and corrupt corporate interests-- but Blanche Lincoln won a close reelection race last night. There isn't a lot we know about Bill Halter and I doubt he would have turned out to be some kind of a progressive knight in shining armor but there is one thing we do know about him: he's not Blanche Lincoln. His first priority was never going to be to kill the Estate Tax or try to undercut Democrats at every turn-- from Social Security and health-care reform to Employee Free Choice. Lincoln has had a disgraceful and hackish career even when she was just a slimy Blue Dog in the House using another name (Blanche Lambert). Watching her seamlessly transition to K Street would have been more than natural. But, alas, she'll still be forcing the Senate Democrats to water down every bill and make each even less family friendly and more in line with her corporate donors' avaricious self interest. Unless-- as is very likely-- she loses in November to corporate shill GOP slob John Boozman.

There was some excellent news out of Arkansas as well. Proven progressive leader Joyce Elliott beat conservative hack Robbie Wills in the second C.D. (Little Rock) and will now face Karl Rove crooked protege Tim Griffin. Please give her a hand (and whatever you can afford). She's a Blue America endorsed candidate and you can donate here. She'll need the help. If she wins in November she'll be the first African American elected from Arkansas since the mid-1800s.

But there's no getting around the tremendous loss last night in California's 36th district, where voters decided to give reactionary warmonger Jane Harman another term instead of doing the sensible thing and electing Marcy Winograd. We'll just have to learn to fight harder and smarter.

But primary season is far from over and there are still plenty of messages Inside-the-Beltway Democrats need to hear. The next key races coming up to focus on are the North Carolina Senate primary that pits progressive champion Elaine Marshall, the front-running, against an ambitious but unaccomplished empty suit being pushed by Bob Menendez. That comes up June 22 and yesterday Durham Mayor Bill Bell endorsed her. This past weekend the National Federation of Democratic Women announced she has been selected as the Outstanding Democratic Woman Elected Official for 2010. Former opponent Ken Lewis, the guy who came in third, not only endorsed her -- he joined her campaign as chairman! Please consider adding your support here.

That same day, the 22nd, Utah Democrats have the most exciting and meaningful primary they've had in my memory when progressive champion Claudia Wright faces struggling Blue Dog incumbent Jim Matheson. Matheson has asked the voters to look at his record and she is responding to that challenge.

"Matheson has shown little if no leadership in his 10 years in office and the Second District deserves better" Claudia told us. "I believe he voted for the repeal of DADT simply due to the fact that I am in this race... [and] the fact that he attended the Grand Marshal Reception for Pride the weekend, something he has never done, shows he is pandering the base." Matheson appeared like a fish out of water at the reception unable to interact with anyone there. He left before the annual Pride Awards were presented and skipped the actual parade at Washington Park entirely. Claudia was given the opportunity to address Pride, and took part in the Pride Parade and was welcomed with rousing applause at every turn.

"I also question the timing of his introducing the two wilderness bills this last month, one of which trades land destroyed by off road vehicles and snowmobiles at the Snowbird Ski Resort for pristine wilderness." she said. And at a press conference on Monday, she questioned his statement last week "that we need to look at safety issues when it comes to deep water oil rigs," as too little too late. "He has been on the Subcommittee for Energy and Environment for ten years, where has his leadership been?" Energy companies know exactly where-- and have been very grateful.

Following a successful fundraiser Monday evening, Claudia is now heading out on her Wright Way Tour throughout the sprawling Second District to meet with voters and tell them of her pledge to revisit them each month from DC to share ideas and issues with them, something Matheson doesn't seem to believe it-- and certainly doesn't do.

And that brings us to July, a month with two important races for anyone interested in taking the Democratic Party back from corporately funded conservative Blue Dogs. Both races pit proven progressive state legislators against 2 of the most reactionary Democrats in Congress, John Barrow and Dan Boren. In GA-12 we see a re-match with former state Senator Regina Thomas, except this year Barrow doesn't have the support of President Obama like he did when he lied his way back into office in 2008. Although Barrow is running a well-financed media campaign, Regina has a grassroots operation and the power of constituent rage over Barrow's attempt to undermine health-care reform and other initiatives backed by President Obama and the constituents who Barrow has routinely ignored in favor of his country club friends who vote for the Republicans anyway.

The following week (July 27) anti-health care fanatic Dan Boren is facing Oklahoma state Senator Jim Wilson, a health-care reform champion. It is also a classic battle between an outrageously corrupt and entrenched incumbent and a reform-minded clean-government type. Like Matheson, Boren has wormed his way onto natural resources committees where he's in line to get tremendous bribes -- disguised as campaign contributions (he's the #1 House member, including Republicans, on the payroll of Big Oil in this cycle!) -- and sabotage effective regulation of the predatory corporate instincts of his paymasters.

You can help us defeat Matheson, Barrow and Boren-- and replace them with Claudia Wright, Regina Thomas and Jim Wilson-- at Blue America's Blue Dog page.

The Arkansas Democratic Senate runoff election between Bill Halter and Blanche Lincoln is a week from today. SEIU, which has been heavily involved supporting Halter (along with other labor unions and MoveOn), has a new ad on the air today hitting Lincoln for long-time support of Wall Street banks and investment companies. Here's the ad:

Blanche Lincoln has a long history of being in the pockets of Big Banks. In 2005 she voted in favor of the onerous Bankruptcy Reform Act. This law makes it harder for individuals to file bankruptcy and came after years and years of lobbying by the Big Banks. More recently, Lincoln voted in favor of bailing out Wall Street through TARP. Her Big Bank favoritism continued this year when she voted against putting a cap on the rates allowed for out-of-state credit card lenders. Delaware Online reported: "The amendment to the financial reform bill would have allowed all 50 states to impose individual interest rate caps on out-of-state lenders -- meaning card companies would not be able to use one national rate set in the state where they are chartered."
Isn't it great to have Blanche Lincoln on your side? Sure, it is if you're a Big Bank or Wall Street firm. But if you're just a regular working American who can't donate over $800,000 to Lincoln like the securities and investment industry, you're SOL.
Lincoln's recent ads have tried to attack labor for supporting Bill Halter. This is a pretty bizarre critique, considering the unions who are supporting Halter are doing so because it is what their Arkansan members want. Just putting the word "Washington" in front of the word "union" doesn't move the target of Lincoln's ads out of Arkansan and back to the nation's capital. The good news is, recent polling by Daily Kos and Research 2000 shows Halter three points ahead of Lincoln, though still within the margin of error.
If you're in Arkansas, early vote for Bill Halter. And no matter where you are, support Bill Halter for Senate in Arkansas.

Blue America just started a new, fun contest. We're trying to make the Senate a more progressive place to live in. So, it's time for The May Senate Primaries and we need your help.

Digby:

Although Blue America does occasionally work on the Senate (hi Blanche!), we mostly concentrate on electing better Democrats to the House. However, that doesn't mean that when an opportune moment arises we aren't in there trying to help, especially when it comes to sending a message to the Party that it needs to be philosophically coherent and stop supporting any right wing conservative who deigns to put a "D" after his or her name.

One of those moments is upon us, or I should say a whole month is upon us. There are five crucial Senate primaries in May-- North Carolina, Ohio, Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Each pits a more progressive grassroots candidate against a more conservative Establishment candidate, respectively Elaine Marshall vs Cal Cunningham, Jennifer Brunner vs Lee Fisher, Bill Halter vs Blanche Lincoln, Joe Sestak vs Arlen Specter and Jack Conway vs Daniel Mongiardo. If any of them, much less all of them, happened to win it would be a seminal moment for the Democratic Party. And we'd like to pitch in a little bit and do our part.

Howie Klein sent me an email:

So... what could these candidates-- in the words of Barenaked Ladies-- do with a million dollars? Well, they could start to match the huge influx of corporate cash the Supreme Court has guaranteed would flow into the campaigns of corrupt Wall Street shills like Richard Burr (NC), Rob Portman (OH) and other conservative corporate suck-ups for starters. So Blue America has an idea for a little contest. We don't have a million dollars to deploy yet but we do have something no Wall Street banksters have. We have a genuine RIAA-certified Barenaked Ladies multi-platinum award for STUNT.

We're going to give it to the campaign that gets the most votes at the Blue America May Senate Primaries page. A vote is a donation to your favorite candidate-- whether one dollar of one-hundred dollars. The candidate with the most votes gets the award disc to auction or to give away to one of their donors.

So, please take a look at the page and make a contribution-- no matter how small-- to either Jennifer Brunner (OH), Jack Conway (KY), Bill Halter AR), Elaine Marshall (NC) or Joe Sestak (PA). It'll be too late in November if, for example, Kentucky voters are forced to choose between Rand Paul and Daniel Mongiardo, two conservatives or between Arlen Specter and Pat Toomey, two Republicans indebted to Big Business.

Do we want the Ben Nelson's of the world controlling the direction of the country?

DOWNLOADS: 1702

PLAYS: 259

(Audio via The Nation)

You can donate to Bill Halter's campaign on our Send The Democrats a Message page.

Blanche Lincoln must be real desperate at this point, and this article by John Brummett in Arkansas proves Blue America was right on the mark by taking her on when most people never heard of her back in 2009.

On the day that Lt. Gov. Bill Halter formally accepted the draft of national left-wing activists and announced he would run in the Democratic primary against U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a person close to Lincoln told me Blanche was going to get tough.

There is a difference, though, between getting tough and getting bogus.

Lincoln’s first salvo was dishonest. The second was a smear...read on

Brummett rips her badly, but accurately. The Nation then catches her lying in radio ads to the African American voters in her district on health care. She has the audacity to say that she stood tall on health care.

Describing Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln's position on healthcare reform as a flip-flop doesn't do justice to her political flexibility. During a year of contentious debate on President Obama's signature domestic priority, she's been all over the map.

In July 2009, she offered her support for Obama's healthcare plan and his inclusion of a public insurance option. "Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans," she wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "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."

Yet two months later, after the public option came under fire from insurance companies and Tea Partiers, Lincoln changed her tune. "I would not support a solely government-funded public option," she said on September 1 in Little Rock. "We can't afford that." She vowed to filibuster any healthcare bill that included the public option she once supported, even though 56 percent of Arkansans backed the provision.

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Now, in an attempt to court the Obama voters she's repelled throughout the past year, Lincoln is running ads on African-American radio in Arkansas claiming she "stood with our president to pass healthcare reform." The ad continues: "Even though the Tea Party and insurance companies attacked Blanche Lincoln, she never abandoned our president, nor you." Listen to the ads below.

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"Who is Blanche Lincoln trying to fool on healthcare?" says the narrator. "Here's the deal: she didn't stand up to the special interests, she worked for them. She sided with those Republicans who tried to kill President Obama's reforms unless insurance company profits were protected. Insurance companies and HMOs rewarded Lincoln with more the $800,000 in campaign cash...Senator Lincoln, my people aren't fooled. Bill Halter is the one who'll stand up for us." In addition to the healthcare ads, Lincoln has been touting her "A" rating from the NAACP, which the organization's Arkansas chapter takes issue with. "If I had to grade her even on health care reform she definitely wouldn't get an A," said Dale Charles, president of the Arkansas NAACP. "She'd maybe get a C minus.

Digby writes:

She deserves absolutely no support from her African American constituents. She voted for the Senate bill only after extreme coercion and we'll never know if she would have voted for the final conference bill. She didn't vote for the reconciliation fix, so I'm thinking probably not. In any case, she was an enemy of the kind of health care reform that her Democratic constituents preferred and made it more difficult to pass anything at all every step of the way.

She certainly does have chutzpah, though, in trying to send this message under the radar. I suppose she thinks that her Republican rivals won't use it against her because it's playing on black radio stations. Good luck with that.

Good times, good times. Blue America PAC was out in front of the entire blogosphere when we targeted Blanche Lincoln as being a major obstructionist to health-care reform in America. We made our decision to raise and spend a ton of money to highlight how she was a typical ConservaDem who was more interested in keeping the health insurance industry rolling in cash than helping Americans in the struggle with health care. You can see all three ads that we ran with your help against her here: Campaign For Health Care Choice.

Howie Klein interviewed Lt. Governor Bill Halter before we started our ad campaign back in June of 2009 to see if he was interested in running against Blanche and he told Howie he wasn't at that time, but I think he sees his opening now.

Howie has much more:

Blue America has been busy all year letting Arkansas voters know that Blanche Lincoln may have a "D" next to her name but when it comes to the key issues that impact ordinary working families and pits their interests against Big Business and Wall Street, she was, in effect, a dependable Republican shill. Politics for her has become cultivating K Street and then fast-talking the Democratic base back home. We helped make that more and more difficult for her. And now, with her approval ratings the lowest of any member of the Senate and with a virtual certainty of defeat at the hands of any Republican, she has a real primary on her hands.

This morning Lt. Governor Bill Halter declared the would enter the May 18th primary against her. (Next week is the deadline for filing.) I spoke with Halter a few months ago and he said he had no intention of running. I feel certain he didn't. But as Lincoln's approval in the state collapsed, he has come to realize that he is the only chance the Democrats have to hold onto the seat.

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Blue America just added Bill to our Send The Democrats A Message ActBlue page, in case you'd like to help him get his campaign message out. Blanche has raised over $7 million so far and has over $5 million on hand much of it from the sleaziest special interests in Washington (and Arkansas).

We've added him to our new: 'Send The Democrats A Message They Can Understand' and you can send him donations there.

Right now Blue America is working on interviewing him again so we can find out as much as we can for you on where he stands on the issues.

Kos writes:

Blanche Lincoln responds to Halter's candidacy:

“I’m excited about today and I’m excited to be an Arkansas Democrat. I’ll file for re-election and continue fighting for Arkansas every day here at home and in the United States Senate. I know that I am the target of both political extremes but that’s what makes this campaign so important to all of us. This Senate seat belongs to Arkansas, not to outside groups that are angry I don’t answer to them.”

Yup. Extremists like the League of Conservation Voters. Extremists like the Democratic Party (and the Obama Administration).