By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — When John McCain won Arizona’s GOP Senate primary last week, pundits said the win showed what an incumbent can do when he has a huge cash pile and is willing to spend it — a lesson that may have relevance in Arkansas’ U.S. Senate race.
Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., doesn’t have the $20 million that McCain spent on his race, but the $1.9 million she reported having in the bank at the end of June easily outstrips the campaign chest of Republican challenger U.S. Rep. John Boozman, who reported having less than $500,000.
Lincoln faced a tough primary challenge from Lt. Gov. Bill Halter earlier this year and has spent $9 million this election cycle, but some say she was too thrifty for too long.
“She’s made a spectacular mistake in strategy in waiting to hold money for the end, when the definition of Blanche Lincoln started back in August of last year,” Republican political consultant Bill Vickery said. “It’s just a classic mistake when you don’t spend money early.
She was defined by the health care issue in Arkansas, and it’s been downhill for her ever since.”
Groups on both the political left and the right began running television ads critical of Lincoln last fall, while the debate over the health care overhaul was raging. Lincoln waited to begin advertising until March, when she drew a Democratic primary opponent in Halter.
“I think that her campaign violated one of the primary rules of politics,” said Democratic political consultant Debbie Wilhite. “If you don’t define yourself, your opponents will. It’s define or be defined, and they let her be defined. It’s going to take a lot to get people to really understand her record.”
Lincoln defeated Halter in a close race. She has trailed her Republican general election opponent, Boozman, in most polls.
“Her folks really did make a mistake in 2009 and just allowed her to be pummeled,” said Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College. “I think it’s just pushed her so far down in the polls that it’s been very hard for her to fight out of that.”
Steve Patterson, Lincoln’s campaign manager, said he doesn’t regret not having bought ads in 2009. He pointed to the example of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who spent nearly $3 million on advertising late last year.
Despite the advertising blitz, a December 2009 poll by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research found that Reid’s favorable rating had increased only 1 percentage point since the previous August.
“That kind of expenditure in 2009, I have serious doubts that that would have had any impact on her (Lincoln’s) standing in July or August 2010,” Patterson said.
Patterson also said the ads referencing Lincoln that ran early in the health care debate were “pretty much a mixed message.”
Lincoln was in a tricky position last year, Barth said. Unlike McCain, who faced a challenge from the right by a Tea Party candidate, Lincoln was being criticized from both sides of the political spectrum — and at the time she did not know what kind of primary opponent she would draw, or if she would draw one.
Barth said there was no way Lincoln could have pleased everyone on health care, but she could have put out the message early in the debate that she was determined to fight for what was best for Arkansas.
“That at least would have been a response and I think would have helped protect her and gotten her out there in a much more positive light through 2009-early 2010,” he said.
The “fighting for Arkansas” theme eventually did appear in Lincoln’s ads during the primary race, most memorably in a spot in which she said she would rather lose the election fighting for what was right than win by turning her back on Arkansas.
In a 30-second spot that debuted earlier this month, Lincoln makes a statement similar to what Barth said should have been her message a year ago.
“There’s no easy way to fix health care, but I worked to find the balance, and I’ll never stop working to make it better for Arkansas,” Lincoln says in the ad.
