Bill Halter lost last night by four percentage points ... It might as well have been 20.
I am confused, angered, upset, but most of all just absolutely stunned. I just do not understand how over 120,000 Arkansas Democrats could honestly cast their vote and believe that Blanche Lincoln was not only the best Democrat in the race but our best change of keeping this seat.
It has been said on this site already, but Arkansas' new Senator this fall will be John Boozman.
I will get to why I firmly believe that in a minute. First, though, I wrote a letter to my hometown paper in Russellville last year after it became apparent that Mrs. Lincoln will vote any way the people with the money wants her to vote when she voted against the public option. In that letter I said that I would not vote for her in the primary and if she somehow made it to November I would either skip that entry or vote for a third party candidate.
I am holding to that.
This is not about sore losing. It's about who is the best candidate in the field that will represent me and the other Democrats in this state. It is not John Boozman and it certainly is NOT Mrs. Lincoln. She showed us long ago that she will sell her vote to the highest bidder and then she has the gall to come back to Arkansas and tell us she is an independent voice for Arkansas, does not even mention that she is a Democrat, and a 120,000 Arkansas Democrats vote for her?
She will lose in November.
All those national organizations that backed her (all the while she was whining and complaining that Bill Halter was being funded by national organizations, the facts just do not back her up) in this primary will leave her and support John Boozman. Does she really think that the Chamber of Commerce will run ANY ads for her? With her victory last night the Democrats in this state guaranteed a victory for Boozman and a pick up for the Republicans.
Congratulations Arkansas Democrats you just handed our seat to a Republican.
And not just any Republican, John Boozman, another career politician who is just as slimy and sells out his votes just as Mrs Lincoln does. He has been my representative for too many years. I guess I am lucky that he is leaving my district. Oy.
I am not going to play nice, I am not going to congratulate Mrs Lincoln for running a horribly negative and nasty campaign against a fellow Democrat. What she did was unforgivable. She deserved to lose this race, she turned her back on Arkansas Democrats, and yet she was supported by President Obama (who I am not have serious reservations about) and former President Clinton (who I have always admired but who just dropped a flight of stairs for this) and 120,000 Arkansas Democrats voted for her?
Bill Halter was our man for many reasons. Whether he was a true progressive or not is really immaterial. What mattered was that he was a true Democrat. He was proud to say that he was a Democrat, unlike Mrs. Lincoln. Yet, the state party backed the woman who is apparently ashamed to be a Democrat. Our president backed a woman who calls herself an independent. Our former president, from this state, who Bill Halter worked for, backed a woman who was funded in part by the Chamber of Commerce.
I am sorry to all my liberal and moderate Democrats. My state has failed you ... horribly. We re-elected a woman who can not even admit that she is a Democrat during a Democratic primary. We re-elected a woman who was partly financed in the Democratic primary by the Chamber of Commerce.
We re-elected a woman in the Democratic primary that you can only tell she is a Democrat because whenever she is on television they put a D after her name.
I am sincerely sorry.