We’ll have a day of annoying speeches in the Senate and then sometime around 8pm we’ll have a vote on cloture/motion to proceed to debate on the health care bill. The only remaining questions are whether Max Baucus can make it back from Montana for the vote (his mother is ill) and whether Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas will join the other 59 members of the Democratic caucus and vote to proceed. Joe Conason notes that the Big Dog weighed in on this issue at his presidential library in Little Rock.
It was Bill Clinton who uttered the most pungent criticism of [Blanche] Lincoln in recent days, however, although he didn’t mention her by name. Speaking at a luncheon to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the opening of his presidential library in Little Rock on Wednesday afternoon, he berated the opponents of reform for preserving a system that spends far more than other developed countries for worse care — at least $900 billion annually, according to his back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Clinton asked his audience, which included hundreds of Democratic donors and activists, to imagine a scenario in which he could somehow run for a third term as president (which drew enthusiastic applause). Then he asked them to consider what would happen if he offered the following campaign promise:
“If you elect me again, the first thing I’m going to do is put a $900 billion tax on you … I’m going to have the government print the money, and put it on elevated flatbeds, and display it along the national mall. And we’re going to broadcast this ceremony on national television. And then I’m going to motor myself from one end of that $900 billion to the other, sprinkling Kerosene on it, and then I’m going to set it afire and watch it burn.
“How many people do you think would vote for me?” he demanded. “If you don’t want to reform healthcare, that is your position. That is what you are advocating.”
Lincoln wasn’t there, but she could have heard the roaring laughter all the way back in Washington.
No one is going to be laughing if Blanche Lincoln gets this vote wrong except Republicans.
