By John Brummett

Having sparred in public with House Republicans and eaten their lunch, President Obama continued his political rehabilitation tour by going over the other day and meeting publicly with U.S. senators of his own party.

This second go-round was a charade, as intra-party events usually are.

To question the president, Majority Leader Harry Reid called on Democratic senators who, like he, are on the ballot this year and in trouble. The purpose was to let these vulnerable senators pretend to talk to the president while actually talking to recalcitrant voters in their home states.

Obama had surely been apprised of the use to which he was being put. Reid surely assured Obama that the questions he’d get were far less about him than about those posing them.

Blanche Lincoln, in more trouble than any Democratic senator, naturally got called on early to direct a query. This was a day after a poll showed two in three Arkansawyers not being able to abide her, more or less, give or take.

So this is what she said to, and asked of, Obama:

Mr. President, I’m about to get beat because I’m all gummed up with you in the minds of folks back in Arkansas and they don’t like you a bit.

Then I got all strung out on health care before painting myself into a corner to cast the 60th vote. And although Arkansas is one of the least healthy and poorest states in the country and would make out like a bandit under this Senate bill, they don’t want your health care reform, whatever they think it is.

So about the only people I could beat right now are Osama bin Laden, John Edwards and you. And Edwards might be close.

So I’m fixing to tell you off in hopes somebody hears this back home, because, Lord have mercy, I need some relief.

Well, OK. That’s not at all what she said. But it’s pretty much what she meant.

Her actual query rambled even more. But what she ended up saying — amid her usual drawled platitudes — was that good small business folks back in Arkansas didn’t think anyone in the Obama administration knew anything about going to work on Monday and meeting a payroll on Friday.

She also said that Obama needed to push back at some of these way-left Democrats and, instead, work with Republicans to try to do something concrete, clear and lasting to address our economic problems.

Minutes later, her campaign staff in Little Rock sent around an e-mail about how she’d gotten candid with the president in behalf of hard-working Arkansas people.

What was Obama supposed to do? Publicly rebuke a senator of his own party? Tell Blanche she was absolutely right and that he was ashamed?

No, he found the hollow ground. Obama said Blanche was quite right about the need to break through ideological divides, but that he couldn’t agree with this idea that the country needed to return to the policies put in place by the Republican administration over the eight years preceding his presidency.

But nobody had said the country ought to do that. Or at least Blanche certainly hadn’t.

Perhaps the president’s mind had wandered during Blanche’s question, maybe when she was telling him she was a seventh-generation Arkansawyer and about something her wise daddy once told her.

So what you had was Lincoln shadow-punching in the vicinity of Obama and Obama shadow-punching in the vicinity of a straw man.

I didn’t sense a spontaneous syllable between them.

Obama should stick to meeting with the Republicans. That’s where he can keep it real.

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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.