Hugh Hewitt; Blanche Lincoln is no Abraham Lincoln. But he needs to correctly identify her state.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ariz., is the most endangered incumbent in the United States Senate. Given her destructive lurch into the lowest form of populism this past weekend, she deserves to be tossed out in 47 weeks, and by a wide margin.
Many centrists of both parties had hoped that Lincoln would be part of the coalition of Democrats, including Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who would insist on a much more pared-down, focused set of health care reforms backed by a real threat of filibuster.
Instead, Lincoln lurched left and sponsored one of the most destructive provisions in a bill full of assaults on free markets generally, and the elderly and doctors specifically.
Lincoln authored an amendment targeting the compensation paid to insurance company executives. Lincoln's brainstorm -- with its roots in the AIG bonus smash-up of the spring and in every soak-the-rich scheme the country has ever heard pitched -- would penalize insurance companies paying salaries of more than $400,000 if those companies generated threshold revenue from premiums generated by the health care bill's new mandate to purchase coverage.
"This is a fair policy aimed at encouraging health insurance executives to put premium dollars toward lower rates and more affordable coverage, not in the pocketbooks of their executives," Lincoln said.
Lincoln's prescription will quickly drive the best executive talent out of the insurance business. When you designate and punish a whipping boy, those folks head for the exits. Lincoln's amendment has designated new enemies of the state, and it doesn't take a Ph.D. to realize that health insurance execs are the new big tobacco.
The irony, of course, is that the demonization of insurance execs is occurring as we are learning that climate scientists are actually the new cover-up experts, talented at character assassination and data manipulation in the service of myths dangerous to the public at large.
Lincoln has looked at her plummeting poll numbers and decided that class envy is her only possible strategy. This is a remarkably bad reading of the numbers, and whoever is masquerading as her pollster has sold her on some deep magic not obvious to mere mortals.
According to a Rasmussen poll published last week, Lincoln trails all four of her announced GOP opponents, including the Republican front-runner, state Sen. Gilbert Baker, whom she trails 47 percent to 41 percent.
More importantly, Arkansas voters oppose the health plan by a margin of 65 percent to 32 percent. Sacrificing a few insurance executives on the fire won't change those numbers, but burning the 2,000-page bill might.
Running as a fierce anti-insurance company populist using campaign funds from the plaintiffs' bar won't fool even the most addled of Arkansas voters. An amendment targeting the dysfunctional tort system that forces the cost of medicine up via massive amounts of unnecessary, defensive medicine might have impressed, but not Lincoln's waste of time and effort. Disgust with such high school grandstanding at such a critical juncture is a likely response from all voters, regardless of party affiliation.
Lincoln could breathe life into her faltering campaign if she would boldly declare herself not just against any sort of public option and for the Stupak Amendment on abortion, but also for a return to the table with all of the parties committed to reform.
But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., appear to have her on their strings, and though these puppeteers would like for her to keep her job, that's not their priority. Lincoln is expendable, though she apparently hasn't figured that out yet.
Senate Democrats still seem to believe that their spin is effective and that the public can be misled about the deep cuts to Medicare, the devastating effect of the bill on doctors and other health care professionals, and the scissoring of home health care benefits.
Lincoln's "kill the beast" pitchfork appeal against insurance execs is the sort of Huey Long rhetoric that wouldn't have worked even in the depths of the Great Depression, much less in an era when the vast majority of the insured like their coverage and don't spend their days in bitter hating of the relatively few execs at the top of the insurance industry.