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Lincoln Attacks Arkansas Working Families; Families Don’t Blanche

by Mike Hall

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) who this week launched a television ad slamming working families as “outside interests” is continuing her descent into “yet another hypocritical, flip-flopping D.C., politician,” says Arkansas AFL-CIO President Alan Hughes.

Lincoln in recent months has piled up a Senate record opposing working families–including voting to send jobs overseas via bad trade deals, reversing her initial support for the Employee Free Choice Act and opposing health care reform legislation with a public health insurance option. Arkansas unions now have endorsed Lt. Gov. Bill Halter (D.) in the upcoming U.S. Senate primary. Says Hughes:

Lincoln has ignored the interests of working people in Arkansas too many times. It’s easy for her to try to paint opponents as outsiders, but working-class voters in Arkansas can see as well as anybody that she has turned her back on us.

Although she’s attacking working families and their unions today, Lincoln sang quite a different tune in 2004 when she was grateful for the backing of the Arkansas AFL-CIO, along with more than $260,000 in working families’ PAC donations. Said Lincoln at the time:

I’m honored to receive the endorsement today from the Arkansas AFL-CIO for my work in the Senate to improve the lives of Arkansas working families.

Her strong support for Wal-Mart, headquartered in Fayetteville, and her silence about the company’s virulent anti-unionism and labor law violations, has earned her the nickname “the senator from Wal-Mart.”

Lincoln was also just one of two Democrats who voted to block President Obama’s nomination of respected attorney Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. Says Hughes:

Only someone who has become a career politician in Washington, D.C., could spend 10 years asking for our support, take hundreds of thousands of dollars from blue-collar workers, then turn around and attack us as outsiders because we wouldn’t help her this time around. Those are not the values people in Arkansas believe in.