Death By Regulations: Has Obama Lost Senator Blanche Lincoln?

by: warner todd huston | published: 11 08, 2011

Last year for the 2010 midterms Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln was in trouble with her reelection. Up until 2010 most felt her seat was a safe one but Democrat challengers pushed the sitting Senator to a runoff that she barely won. 55% of her constituents opposed her.

Lincoln welcomed the support of President Obama who cut an early ad for the Senator portraying her as a "populist crusader." Still, Lincoln lost her her reelection bid to Republican John Boozman.

Obama may have come to Lincoln's aide in 2010, but it doesn't look like Blanche is returning the favor in 2012. Lincoln is leading a charge against the Obama administration's regulatory orgy by taking the chairmanship of a new group called Small Businesses for Sensible Regulation.

One of the refrains from small businesses all across the country has been "uncertainty." It is the uncertainty of how badly Obama's avalanche of regulations will hurt them over both the short and the long term that is, they say, hampering any come back of our economy. Businesses are afraid to hire, to expand, some small businesses are afraid to even stay in business at all for fear of how badly Obama will hurt them with his constant stream of onerous regulations.

“The message that we’re trying to leave is that if we want to create more jobs and make the economy better, how do we somehow get this disproportionate burden of ever increasing new regulations off the backs of the people who create the jobs?” Dan Danner, the chief executive of the National Federation of Independent Business, said at an event launching the SBSR.

Lincoln agreed. The former Senator said that eliminating the uncertainty is the key.

"These are things the Obama administration can do immediately to help job creation," former Arkansas Sen. and Coalition Chairwoman Blanche Lincoln told The Washington Examiner. "One of the best ways we can help small businesses create jobs is to lessen the uncertainty they have in terms of regulation."

In any case, now we have Lincoln standing in opposition to Obama's gorging on the very regulations that are destroying America's small businesses and, consequently, the very middle class for whom he pretends to be a savior.

If Obama has lost Democrat moderates like Lincoln, what does tis say about his own bid for reelection?

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