By John Brummett
For Independence Day weekend, these are the ever-fickle arrows of conventional political wisdom:
Barack Obama — He’s overexposed and shouldn’t do any more health care specials on ABC unless he can produce better answers than he offered the other night.
This is not to criticize his tactical decision to detach from the devilish details of health care while two Senate committees tend to those. That’s probably wise. It is to say he should stay off television if all he can do is regurgitate banal talking points.
We are past the talking-point stage on this issue. How is health care going to work? How is it going to help me? How is it going to cut costs? If you are going to tax my employee-based health care benefits, how is that different from the middle-class tax increase you vowed not to impose? If you want to charge my doctor on the basis of my outcome rather than the tests he orders, who is going to adjudge my outcome? And which test is he not going to give me because he knows you’re not going to pay him for it?
If you don’t have good and specific answers for those, go with the Rose Garden strategy — stay in the office out of sight — because we’ve had two decades of talking about health care reform. You no longer need to sell the public on reform. The public is long sold. Now we need to know what the reform will be.
A related local anecdote: U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln appeared before an audience of retirement center residents last week in Little Rock to talk about health care, and, alas, she merely regurgitated banalities. Afterward one senior woman said to another: “Well, we didn’t learn anything, but at least we didn’t go to sleep.”
Mike Beebe — Is it just me or is this guy overexposed as well?
I was sitting there the other night at the Wildwood Performing Arts Center in west Little Rock awaiting a show by renown Arkansas-born musician Levon Helm and his spectacular 12-piece band. All of a sudden they introduced Beebe to come out and talk about being a 13-year-old kid illegally admitted into a road house/honky tonk near Newport where Levon was playing the drums so uncannily lo those many glorious decades ago.
I began to wonder if the Beebster ever turned anything down. I sensed it would have been much more appropriate for him to be sitting out in the audience, maybe to be recognized from the stage, and to rise meekly at that point, about halfway, and acknowledge uncomfortably the scattered applause.
Governor is not state toastmaster.
He pulled this same stunt by introducing festivities at the Clinton Library when Bill Clinton, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor assembled for old war stories.
The rule of thumb: If it’s not about you, it’s not about you.
Otherwise, he’s doing swell, and my compliments. I always said he’d be a good governor, and I was right. I just didn’t know he’d be ubiquitous.
Mike Huckabee — It is my considered opinion, my fully frightened one, that he will be the Republican nominee for president in 2012.
His Fox TV show is so bad some are starting to think it’s good. He just got tabbed to sit in for the bully O’Reilly. The kook-right Republican base can hardly gather anymore without his showing up to give a red-meat talk of extraordinary nonsense, some calculated, some unintended.
His rivals are Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney and assorted tomcats, which ought to be enough said.
Blanche Lincoln — It’s not that she’s doing poorly; it’s just that I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes.
Over the next several months she will confront, one after the other, votes that will pose severe and practically untenable conflicts between her party’s national agenda and her home-state political considerations as she faces re-election.
It’s just bad timing. She’ll survive it. But I don’t think she’ll be able to take a deep breath until nearly Thanksgiving 2010.
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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.
