The Slippery Senator from Arkansas

It didn’t lake long for Arkansas’ senior senator to undergo her wholly expected transformation.

During the Democratic primary, Blanche Lincoln was fighting off a challenge from the left by rolling out her votes for Obamacare. But in November, she’ll be up against a conservative congressman, so now she’s pivoting to the right to compete for the middle ground.

The primary is over, and all those millions the unions poured into her opponent’s campaign have gone for naught. And so Sen. Lincoln has started to deny that hers was the vote that put Obamacare over the top after all.

Are you worried about what now awaits America’s patients under Obamacare? Easy there, Big Voter. Don’t think about the slowly gathering storm of deficits and dysfunction that may now be in store not just for patients but for doctors and hospitals and accountants and employer-provided insurance plans and the American economy in general.

We’re now assured that any side effects of this massive reworking of American health care will soon wear off; they’ll disappear as surely as Medicare Advantage.

Costs? We’ll worry about those sometime after the election, even sometime after the next presidential election.

That’s the trick to putting over a huge change full of unintended consequences. Just do it in the right, politically advantageous order: Benefits first, costs later. Why rush the bad news? Kick all the problems down the road, even down to the next generation. Make sure that it’ll take a while, like after November’s elections, for all the devils to start emerging from their usual habitat, the details.

When any dissatisfactions arise, pay no attention to that senator behind the curtain. Her vote for Obamacare really wasn’t all that decisive; it wasn’t even a vote for it, not always. For she was on both sides of the issue regularly. So why make such a big deal of it now? Hers was only one vote, just as she said the first time it was questioned.

Never mind that her 60th vote to get Obamacare to the floor of the Senate was the decisive one in the whole process. For after that, Democrats had Carte Blanche, literally, to do whatever they wanted to the American health care system. Once they closed debate, they closed any chance of defeating Obamacare, no matter what shape this amorphous mass of regulations would finally take. No one still knows what all might be in that 2,000-page bill.

Yes, there had been a time when the senior senator from Arkansas was willing to acknowledge, even boast, that her vote had been the decisive one on this issue. But that was back in the Democratic primary, when she felt she had to emphasize her support for the party line. And emphasize it she did. To quote one of her more frequently aired commercials: “I cast the deciding vote on health-care reform because fixing the problem was more important than politics.”

But that was long ago, whole weeks ago, ages ago in political time. Now it’s politics that’s more important than having cast a crucial vote. Or as the senator explained it the day after the run-off was safely over and she’d survived, hers “wasn’t the deciding vote.” No matter what she’d just said in the primary. Send those earlier statements down the memory hole.

Now her story is that she was just “among a handful of five Democrats that worked on getting consensus.” A responsibility shared is a responsibility shirked.

Senator Lincoln’s duly recorded vote may stay forever the same, but her explanation for it keeps changing. When her vote was first questioned, it was just a technical matter, a bit of parliamentary procedure. No need to get all hot-and-bothered about it. Then, when she came under fire from the left, and needed a handy defense, she decided she was mighty proud of that vote after all. Now she’s backing away from it again.

Which is the real Blanche Lincoln? There may not be one.

The Patriot Post® · The Slippery Senator from Arkansas