By John Brummett
No good political reason exists for U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln to stop talking in maddening circles on this “card check” bill.
Trying to have it both ways, at least until a decision actually must be made, isn’t necessarily a sin. It can be smart.
Next weekend Lincoln will have a fund-raiser in Little Rock attended by Vice President Joe Biden, who is a close friend of hers. The event will net her merely something between $800,000 and a million dollars.
She starts with $600,000, representing a thousand dollars each from 600 or so members of a “host committee” comprising some of the most prominent and stridently conservative business and farm leaders of the state.
These business people appreciate Lincoln’s economically moderate and generally pro-business voting record. They also ante up in fervent hope that she’ll be with them against “card check,” which is organized labor’s initiative to let work forces impose unions merely by signatures on cards by a majority of workers.
Now signature cards call a future election, which the National Labor Relations Board runs with a secret ballot.
Business people think “card check” will be the end of the world. They think unions will lean on workers. Labor thinks “card check” is the very ticket to compensation for years of weakening of labor’s leverage under anti-union Republican administrations.
Lincoln must worry about Republicans coming hard after her next year. Republicans simply can’t sit out another U.S. Senate race in Arkansas after giving Mark Pryor a free pass last year.
They see that John McCain routed Barack Obama in Arkansas. Notwithstanding special circumstances — race and liberalism and guns — they sense opportunities in an electorate that would go 61-39 for a Republican in any circumstance.
What Republicans will find in Arkansas is an old boy who voted for McCain and will vote for Lincoln. In fact, he voted for McCain and goes duck-hunting with Lincoln.
Still, Lincoln might find herself next year needing to repel a strengthening Republican insurgency and in need of national labor dollars. Big labor money usually doesn’t get spent until late and then in places where it can do the most last-minute good to preserve or enhance the most labor-friendly, meaning Democratic, candidate.
So until and unless absolutely necessary, there is no reason for Lincoln to foreclose either home-state business support or the prospect of labor help.
She should keep rambling about how the best way to help both employers and employees in Arkansas is to create new jobs and make health care more readily available and affordable.
That is both evasion and truth.
She is absolutely right that we’re going to do health care reform and general economic rescue first, as we ought, even as we must. The “card check” bill, while debated in both chambers last year, hasn’t even been filed this time in either chamber. Presumably it would start at the committee level and take some time.
The bill conceivably could then be amended into a compromise that would lessen the emotion and polarization. Maybe we could keep the secret ballot, but expedite the process in some new, labor-leaning ways.
Finally, Lincoln’s vote may not matter because it could well be that the Democrats can’t stir up 60 votes to break a filibuster against the bill regardless of what she does.
Al Franken will give the Democrats 57 actual seats and a working majority of 59, counting independents Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders. Even if the Democrats hold all of those, meaning not just Lincoln but Pryor and Mary Landrieu and any of four or five other Democratic moderates, they’d still need a Republican.
Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has been seen as the best Republican prospect for that vote. He voted to end the filibuster last time — the only Republican to do so. But now, facing re-election next year, he wavers. A vote for cloture on “card check” could net him a vigorous Republican primary, one he could lose.
So it happened over the last few days that people in Arkansas said they’d gleaned that Lincoln was against “card check” while a leading AFL-CIO official said in Washington that he was confident she remained a firm supporter.
It sounds like Blanche has everybody pretty much where she wants them.
If she must say yes or no in a vote that matters over the next several months, I’m almost positive she’ll go against “card check.”
If forced to choose, she’d need the Arkansas business community most.
That Arkansas Democrats win with business and farm support is a sacred tenet of our state’s political gospel.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
