RUSSELLVILLE — Shaking hands at the Pope County Courthouse, U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln got up on her tippytoes, clasped her hands together and gave a supporter a big smile.
“Thank you! Thank you for all you do,” Lincoln told the woman. “I’m so proud!”
While campaigning, Lincoln often is like the downhome “blessed baby” girl, as her mother calls her. The senator talks about growing up on a farm in Phillips County, about listening to her grandfather tell stories of World War I, and about Southernstyle get-togethers.
“Your husband has been so good to me to have me here and take me all around the courthouse,” Lincoln told the wife of Pope County Judge Jim Ed Gibson. “I’d love to be here one of y'all’s Christmas parties. I bet they are a dandy!”
Her campaign, though, is pushing a different image as the Democratic Party nominee seeks re-election.
“One tough lady,” is how Lincoln is described in campaign literature, bumper stickers and yard signs.
Can Lincoln be a tough lady and a baby girl?
“Absolutely, why couldn’t you?” Lincoln said in an interview. “Being tough doesn’t mean being rude. Mother and Daddy always encouraged us to think outside the box, to be imaginative and innovative. But if it was rude or dangerous it wasn’t allowed. Other than that, you could knock yourself out.”
She’s also sought to balance her policy stances.
Lincoln has asserted she’s an independent, sometimes supporting the conservative side and sometimes supporting the liberal side, but never always in either camp.
She won a Democratic runoff in June, after the May primary, over Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who criticized her for being too conservative.
Now her Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. John Boozman, accuses her of being too cozy with President Barack Obama’s agenda.
On one hand, she voted for President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education bill, for Bush’s 2001 tax cut, and for the resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq.
On the other end of the spectrum, she voted against Bush’s 2003 tax cut, against his plan for a U.S. constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage, and for President Bill Clinton’s tax increase in 1993.
On some issues, she’s stood in more than one place, taking a while to decide where she’ll end up.
For example, during the health-care debate in 2009, she initially said she was open to a “public option” of health insurance. But later, after much opposition to that idea, she declared herself firmly against it.
During the primary campaign, unions criticized her for reversing herself to oppose a bill to make it easier to unionize, after once being a sponsor of it.
More recently, she said she favored extending the Bush 2001 tax cuts only to those with salaries below $200,000 a year, the same level sought by Obama. But she later said she was also open to extending them for the wealthy, if there was a way to work that out within the budget.
Lincoln says such delays in her decision-making don’t mean she’s trying to make everybody happy or searching for the politically safe course.
She questioned “how in the world” anyone could think that, noting that she has opponents who have spent millions of dollars to get her defeated.
She said it sometimes takes time to sort through complicated issues.
“I don’t feel compelled to be pigeonholed,” she said.
A key part of her platform is her chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee. She talks about the influence she has over U.S. farm policy andhow that can help Arkansas farmers. But she also stresses the role the committee has on rural services and school lunch programs.
At the courthouse in Russellville, she announced grants of $597,000 to help low-income people in a fivecounty area build and refurbish their houses.
“I can’t tell you how proud I am of this grant,” Lincoln told about 20 people in the courthouse basement. “It’s so meaningful for people’s lives. It’s pretty amazing.”
She offered a ready response for those who would say the grant exemplifies wasteful federal spending.
“It’s not just money being given away,” Lincoln said. “It’s not easy to apply for grants. We want to make sure they are well-spent.”
Greeting workers at the courthouse, she told them how people don’t realize how much goes on in the courthouse and that she used to visit courthouses often with her father, Jordan Lambert, a rice farmer who also worked in real estate.
“We were a very close family,” she said.
She frequently uses family anecdotes to make points about politics or policy. For instance:
On world trade: “Dad said a long time ago you can’t circle your wagons and sell your widgets and hamburgers to each other.”
On helping Arkansas businesses that lose sales to the Internet: “There is no doubt, having grown up on a main street, spending Saturdaymornings with my Granddad, getting to spend my money on a record or comic book when I was there with him, knowing how important that was to those main street vendors.”
On Senate qualifications. “The best thing I have going for me in this race, and more importantly doing a good job for the people of Arkansas, is that I’m a mother, a daughter, a wife, and I take those very seriously, and I think it makes me a better senator.”
Lincoln acknowledges that lots of people, including Boozman, could say the same thing: that they are qualified because of having parents, siblings and children.
But she said being a “working mom” to twins Reece and Bennett, 14, gives her a unique perspective in the Senate.
Unions supporting Halter during the primary criticized her for living out-of-state and accused her of being out-oftouch. The Lincolns own a home in Arlington, Va. Her twin sons attend school in Virginia. Her husband, Steve, an obstetrician/gynecologist, maintains a practice in Fairfax, Va.
The family also owns a home in Little Rock off Pleasant Valley Road, which is the senator’s official residence. But she doesn’t come back to Arkansas as often as U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, also a Democrat, whose wife stays in Little Rock where their sons attend school.
Lincoln says she puts a premium on “being a good mom” and that means seeing her children on a regular basis.
She said she takes “very seriously” being a mother and a senator.
“My mom told me a long time ago you can have all those things, but you have to realize you make choices at times,” Lincoln said. “ Some-times you make a choice that your kids need you and tell your husband and your work I need to spend some time with kids. Sometimes you tell them, ‘Guys, you need to fix dinner tonight because I need to be doing something else.’”
These days she’s keeping a busy campaign schedule. On Oct. 15, she spoke to two groups in Little Rock. Then she stopped by her Senate office to change from business attire to jeans before headingto the Arkansas State Fair.
She stayed there for three hours, visiting farmers at the livestock auction on the dirt floor of Barton Coliseum, and shaking hands with potential voters in the Hall of Industry.
“I’ll work hard for you,” Lincoln told people. “I’ll make you proud.”
She stopped at several booths.
While she guessed how much money was in a box, people manning the nearby Republican Party booth stood and stared at the senator. She avoided the GOP booth and instead bought pecans andregistered to win Florida vacations.
Lincoln said it doesn’t bother her when voters don’t seem to appreciate the federal help she’s brought to Arkansas communities and the potential she has for doing more as Agriculture Committee chairman.
“People are frustrated, and rightfully so,” she said. “This is the hardest economy since the Depression.”
She said she’s confident Democrats can help improve the economy as they did in the 1990s under Clinton.
“I don’t give up,” Lincoln said “That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it ?”
Front Section, Pages 12 on 10/24/2010