By John Brummett

 “Honey, I’m catching it from all sides.” — U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln

Some other centrist Democratic member of the U.S. Senate — not Blanche Lincoln — might find a way out on Majority Leader Harry Reid’s ploy.

Reid is pushing, for the time being, a new government-operated health insurer, the vaunted “public option,” by which state governments would have to take action to opt out of it.

He is trying two competing tactics at once. Let’s start with the one that further paints Lincoln into a corner.

By obliging liberals on the public option, Reid is seeking to pressure Democratic centrists like Lincoln, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh not to stand in the way.

He wants to give these centrists the option to vote to end the Republican filibuster, requiring 60 votes, thus freeing the bill for passage by a simple majority of 51 votes. These centrists would be welcome to vote against the bill itself, since their votes could be spared.

Reid wants the centrists to say they dare not stand with Republicans as obstructionists simply to moving the process along, regardless of how they feel about any particulars in the bill.

Somebody else might get away with that transparent finesse. Pryor might, actually, because he’s not on the ballot again for five years, a couple of eons in electoral politics.

Blanche can’t. She’s on the ballot now. Emotions rage on health care now. Frustration with her mushy, convoluted evasiveness grows now.

For her to try such a stunt would be fatal, a victim of two piercing wounds.

First, voters would put her down as voting for the bill because she voted to let it get to the floor for certain passage. And that would be true. Republican leader Mitch McConnell is already casting a vote for cloture of a filibuster as a vote for a public option.

Second, Lincoln would merely exacerbate her dreadful reputation for being so wishy-washy as to be practically a caricature.

She would manage to appear on both sides to the very end, cast as both liberal and unprincipled.

Getting the 60 votes to end a filibuster apparently will require every member of the Democratic caucus. That’s the case because Reid, by putting in the opt-out public option, lost his only Republican, Maine’s Olympia Snowe.

Joe Lieberman, the independent who caucuses with the Democrats, now says he will support the Republican filibuster so long as this kind of opt-out public option is included. That takes Blanche off one hook, that being the one by which she might have been singularly responsible for killing a public option.

Now let’s consider Reed’s simultaneous and competing tactic: If he can’t get 60 votes to close a filibuster with the public option, as I don’t believe he can, then he can always tell the liberal base that he did everything he could for a new government insurer, but that now he’ll have to retreat.

Then he — or some other senator, when floor debate begins — could offer an amendment to omit the opt-out public option and reinstate the so-called “trigger” of a public option. That would restore the support of Snowe and free Blanche to attend to the near-Republicanism she seems to find necessary to advance her chances of getting re-elected.

P.S.: In regard to the craziness of Lincoln’s world, consider that the latest prospective Republican candidate for her office is Stanley Reed, farmer and lawyer from Marianna and, until recently, chairman of the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees and president of the Arkansas Farm Bureau.

Just a few months ago, Reed was saying he couldn’t imagine running against Blanche considering her diligent service to Arkansas agriculture. And that was before she became chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee.

And last November, Lincoln entered into the congressional record a statement of high praise for Reed on the occasion of his Farm Bureau presidency ending.

Reed’s interest in running seems wholly opportunistic, motivated merely by the chance of winning against an incumbent stranded in a tight corner. But, then, this does seem to be one heck of an opportunity.

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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.