The nation's most unpopular senator still refuses to own up to her failures.
Speaking to Arkansas Public Radio in Little Rock on Monday, the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee appeared to blame Lt. Gov. Bill Halter and the swarm of outside groups that backed his insurgent bid for her current perilous political position.
FM-89 reporter Kelly MacNeil asked Lincoln whether she thought she would be even with Boozman now if “it weren’t for that tough primary.” Lincoln replied, “Yeah, oh yeah ... I believe I would.”
“When somebody spends $21 million of negative advertising against you, you’ve got to spend an awful lot of time and energy winning back people’s approval and people’s trust,” Lincoln said.
Reality:
The primary was May 18. Fact is, Lincoln was always dead in the water. It was only her ginormous ego that preventer her from seeing it. And when the wife of the executive director of the DSCC works as Lincoln's finance director, well then, the party also has no interest in seeing her retire.
Too bad, because she was always fatally unpopular:
Maybe this seat was a goner no matter what. Maybe Halter would be losing by 10 points, instead of 20 -- still only worth a loss in the end.
But Republicans would've had to fight harder for the seat, spent money, put GOP nominee John Boozman under pressure. Halter had positive favorability ratings, could play the outsider card in a tough year for incumbents. And he would've had an enthusiastic corps of grassroots and union groups fueling his candidacy. All of that would've been a positive for grassroots Democrats eager for something to get excited about this dreary cycle, yet the establishment rallied around their dead-in-the-water and useless incumbent.
And now she blames Halter?
Final note -- Lincoln was bailed out, in huge part, by a lying campaign by the GOP shadow group Americans for Job Security, who dumped a million into the primary on Lincoln's behalf. Funny how they abandoned her after the primary, content in having prevented the Democrats from electing their best candidate.
Still, to be fair, Lincoln's final achievement will be a genuine bipartisan victory -- as both sides cheer her defeat and banishment into ignominy.