Lincoln Takes Working Families’ Money and Runs

March 26, 2010

Justin Nickels, AFSCME’s state coordinator, is working with the Arkansas AFL-CIO for a few weeks and reports that the state’s working families are outraged over Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s latest attack on them in this post from the AFL-CIO Now Blog.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s campaign yesterday began a telephone survey asking constituents how they felt about her primary opponent, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, “accepting money from labor unions.” It was an underhanded, negative attack the Democratic senator from Arkansas hoped would distance herself from her opponent and it seems working families. Lincoln doesn’t seem to want to talk about how much money she’s received from labor unions. Her career donations from labor PACs total $576,900. President Alan Hughes of the Arkansas AFL-CIO released this statement Thursday morning:

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. That’s not the values people in Arkansas believe in.

Later in the afternoon, Lincoln released her questionnaire to the Arkansas AFL-CIO and demanded Halter to release his own. Her questionnaire reiterated her recent opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act, which she in fact supported before the Democrats regained the White House. The Arkansas AFL-CIO then released this statement:

Today, Sen. Blanche Lincoln released her questionnaire to the Arkansas AFL-CIO and challenged Lt. Gov. Bill Halter to do the same thing. We want to thank the Senator for acknowledging that she sought after, and in the past did receive, the support of Arkansas working families—working families she now calls outside interest groups. This just goes to show how empty her promises to fight for them on jobs, health care and trade have been.