By  John Brummett

Many tough questions currently vex Arkansas politics. Today I want to raise but one of them.

How long should U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln sit idly by and watch her poll numbers plummet like this without tapping some of that $6 million she has on hand to try to do something about it?

It’s an interesting study in political tactics and strategy.

This is, after all, nine months before the general election and she, as yet, has no Democratic primary opponent. You want to be smart with your money. You don’t want to panic this early just because you’re losing in polls to nondescript Republicans — to yourself, really, and the mess in Washington in which you’re unavoidably mired.

You don’t want to end up in October cash-strapped and wishing you had that money back.

But nor do you want to look up in October and say, gosh, I never had a chance once I decided not to defend myself in February, or maybe March.

And if you do choose to go up on TV now, what do you say?

A warm and fuzzy biographical introduction, something designed to remind Arkansas voters that this is a seventh-generation Arkansawyer and farmer’s daughter who shoots ducks and raises fine twin boys, might not be the way to go. The current attitude in Arkansas might find that to be corny blather and off-putting.

Yeah, I knew that already, people might say, but you still went up there, Blanche, and horsed around on health care and card check and all that other. Don’t BS me, the people might say, because that’s the mood they seem to be in.

And Lincoln, to be frank, has a kind of natural corniness to her personal style.

Yet she probably needs to be on TV soon. The health care debate sent about $6 million in special interest advertising into Arkansas, by her campaign’s calculations, for what essentially were negative attacks on her.

The result is that negative views against her are becoming embedded. To let them take deeper root without resistance would be highly perilous.

She needs to remind Arkansas voters that she’s not a Barack Obama pawn trying to destroy life as we know it with government health insurance.

Lincoln probably needs to eschew any sweet biographical spot and get straight to a message. And that message needs to be that she’s been in Washington fighting for common-sense Arkansas values against all that partisan nonsense in Washington that the people so resent.

A television spot in which she says the people of Arkansas told her plainly that they didn’t want government health insurance and that, in response, she became personally responsible for getting the public option government insurer killed in the Senate bill — it’s a point she could make credibly, with no more than the usual quotient of oversimplification and overstatement.

Similarly effective, or at least tactically wise, would be a spot in which she tells the voters of Arkansas this: When she got a chance to ask the president a public question, she went to bat for Arkansas values and hard-working Arkansas people to encourage him to push back against the partisan extremes that are dominating debate but making practical solutions to problems impossible.

That is to say she needs to get right to the point and she needs to do so before too very long.

How about a negative ad of her own against one or more of the Republican candidates, perhaps John Boozman and Gil Baker?

That probably would run the risk of galvanizing Republican support for them on the theory that she attacks them now because she fears them most. That’s powder better kept dry, I suspect.

There are three concurrent U.S. Senate races in Arkansas right now. One is nine Republican candidates against each other. The second pits those nine against Lincoln.

The third, the most fascinating of all, has Blanche versus Blanche. And that’s the one she needs to make a little investment in trying to do something about.

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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.