By John Brummett

There are Arkansas liberals — really — who dismiss U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln as no better than any Republican who might replace her.

It’s all on account of Lincoln’s centrist independence, largely on health care, and her calculated concessions to business people, farmers and rural conservatives in a state that rejected Barack Obama overwhelmingly.

All in the world she’s guilty of is trying to find a way to vote for health care reform and keep her seat Democratic in an ever-reddening state.

Liberals find this abandonment of Lincoln awfully easy to express nearly a year from her actual match-up against an honest-to-goodness conservative Republican. But there’s an old saying that everything is relative.

Today’s vacuum makes big talk easy. Then it gets filled by someone like Gilbert Baker and maybe Lincoln starts to look a lot better by being not Gilbert Baker.

Perhaps, then, it would be instructive for these liberals to behold a sneak preview of next year’s transformed dynamic. They can find it in the recent dust-up over abortion.

Baker, the perky right-wing state senator from Conway and currently the likeliest Republican nominee, has revealed in this little episode such potential as a right-wing demagogue that he seems likely to make Lincoln, by contrast, look light years better to liberals.

Federal law now prohibits the expenditure of federal money to subsidize abortions except in cases of rape and incest. Alas, this law has become all gummed up in the health care reform issue with its proposed health care exchanges through which persons could shop for insurance and receive government subsidies up to certain middle-class incomes.

To pass the health care bill in the House last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to agree most grudgingly, even angrily, to an amendment saying no woman — period — could get health insurance that covered abortion through any private insurer participating in the health care exchange through which federal subsidies were granted.

In response, Lincoln has made a basic but compelling point. It is that health reform should preserve the status quo on a peripheral matter such as this — that there should continue to be no federal subsidies for abortion. But it’s also that the currently existing ability of a woman to pay on her own for abortion coverage through some private insurer willing to sell it should not be part of the health care reform issue, which is sufficiently challenging already.

Lincoln has extolled the Senate Finance Committee bill that she voted for and still advocates. It expressly forbids the spending of any government money to subsidize abortion coverage through any insurer participating in this new exchange. But it does not plow any new ground to prevent any woman from using her own money to secure such coverage. It separates subsidies from personal money.

The right-wingers say the money is all commingled any way you look at it, but that’s so only if all currency is commingled and there’s no real difference between accounts. It’s true only if every dollar in your pocket is really all our money.

So Baker put out a statement saying, “As a pro-life U.S. senator, I would never support a measure that would use federal taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions. Sen. Lincoln’s pro-abortion position does not reflect the values of the people of Arkansas.”

That is a slick little statement that is wholly dishonest.

By saying he would never use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, Baker implies that Lincoln would. But she expressly wouldn’t. The Finance Committee bill she fully embraces specifically preserves the existing law banning federal money for abortions.

By saying Lincoln has a “pro-abortion position” and tying that phrase to the preceding reference to his own opposition to using federal taxpayer dollars for abortion, Baker misleads badly, deliberately and cynically.

If it turns out to be Lincoln vs. Baker, people are going to learn the difference between a pragmatic centrist Democrat and a real conservative Republican.

They should pick the one they prefer, of course, but no one should get away with saying they’re the same thing.
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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.