By John Brummett

U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln said it a dozen or so times in the debate on public television last week. It was that she, if permitted, would continue to be an “independent voice” in Washington.

Lincoln had best hope she was not very persuasive.

If an independent voice is what you really want, and Lord knows you are not going to get it from milquetoasty Republican automaton John Boozman, then your real choice is the small and tough-seeming fellow to Lincoln’s left, both physically during the debate and in political philosophy.

John Gray, the Green Party candidate, is a retired engineer. He once worked for the Atomic Energy Commission and then became an anti-nuclear activist. As an engineer, he consulted the automotive industry and helped it relocate factories to Mexico. Now he offers penance, saying NAFTA and the World Trade Organization and the so-called free global economy are ruining us all.

He’s mayor of Greenland, the town just south of Fayetteville, and he was the hands-down winner of this debate, if, that is, relentless and unafraid truth-telling appeals to you.

Gray made only one error, saying something about how Willy Loman explained that he robbed banks because that was where the money was. Actually, Willie Sutton was the bank robber who said that. Loman, from “Death of as Salesman,” confronted a more complex predicament.

After the debate I heard a couple of Gray’s associates telling him he should have seen all the heads nodding in the audience as he spoke. They must have been seated behind me.

Gray said, among other things, that:

—There is no reason for a private health insurance industry even to exist. No health insurance company ever stitched a wound or tended to a broken bone. We could save money by expanding our nonprofit and low-overhead Medicare to be the single-payer to doctors for everyone, not just the elderly. Doctors make plenty of money and they would continue to make plenty in such a system, Gray said. We’d have less need for torts, and thus for tort reform, he argued, if the single-paying government had the right to kick out of its reimbursement pool any physician who mangled patients.

—If you rely on cheap labor alone for jobs, you are doomed because there always will be somebody who will come along and work people or children for less.

—This idea that corporations and people have the same free-speech rights is “nonsense” because his 91-year-old mother is ailing and hearing-impaired and there is no way in the world her speech rights are as accessible and powerful of those of, say, Wal-Mart.

—There is no remotely sane reason to deny a gay person the right to serve openly in our military. Our military needs competent people and we behave as some kind of “American Taliban” if we worry about what people are doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

—Any graph will plainly show that Republicans run up deficits and Democrats bring them down, which is one reason that he, in the miraculous event he got elected, would caucus with the Democrats.

Maybe Gray’s best moment was on the question of whether to brag about bringing federal spending to Arkansas, as Lincoln does, or call for imposing a moratorium and/or reduction on local projects to make serious spending cuts, as Boozman does.

Gray said any engineer could tell you that, generally speaking, 80 percent of your costs will come from 20 percent of your activity. Addressing the deficit honestly must mean reforming big-ticket items, he said, not nickel-and-diming ourselves over a sewer project for some poor small Arkansas town.

For one thing, he said, we could close a lot of these military bases, those Cold War relics.

Lincoln preaches about independence. This John Gray positively meddles.

——-
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.