Can Blanche Lincoln Survive a Democratic Challenge?

A good headline for 2010 might go like this: “Voters Tell Congress: Welcome to Unemployment.”

Incumbents are easy to spot at debates this year — they’re the ones with bags over their heads. Nude modeling on the résumé? No problem, as Scott Brown of Massachusetts proved. The fatal scandal is Washington experience. The public’s opinion of Congress is at its lowest level in at least 25 years, according to polling by the Pew Research Center. For Republican Senator Robert Bennett of Utah, that translated into a third-place finish at his state’s GOP convention, shutting him out of the primary. Senate majority leader Harry Reid is flailing in Nevada; Senator Arlen Specter appears to be drowning in Pennsylvania; House incumbents are bracing for a tidal wave, with Wisconsin Democrat David Obey, third in seniority, only the latest to run up the white flag of retirement.

(See 10 races that have Democrats worried for 2010.)

In Arkansas, the two-term Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln is struggling to survive a well-funded primary challenge so that she can limp into the general election as wounded as a three-legged underdog. Moderation is Lincoln’s trademark, but this year she has outdone herself at bringing right and left together: both sides want to get rid of her.

TIME caught up with Lincoln during a recent campaign trip to Northwest Arkansas, the booming Ozarks region that is home to Walmart, Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt trucking. She was coming off two widely criticized debate performances and struggling to find her voice in a bitter campaign against Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter as the May 18 Democratic primary approached. Gamely, she suggests that the anti-incumbent surge might recede in time to rescue her re-election hopes. “This cycle started so early,” she says. “We started putting our campaign together in January of 2009. At some point I think that people have to calm down a little and say, We need someone who looks for common ground to move forward.”

(See 10 races that have Republicans worried for 2010.)

But in Arkansas, unemployment has been rising, not falling, in recent months and current events — Europe panic, terror plots, the oil spill, stocks back on the roller coaster — haven’t been conducive to calm. If Lincoln, 49, manages to save her seat, it will be thanks to a combination of bare-knuckles brawling and political jujitsu, as she touts her insider’s ability to stick up for outsiders.

In September, Lincoln became the first woman and the first Arkansas Senator to head the Agriculture Committee, and she is trying to make sure that voters understand the cost of dumping her. Agriculture is a quarter of the razorback economy, and the Ag Committee controls programs, such as school nutrition and food stamps, that mean a lot to city dwellers as well. She planted her flag in the anti–Wall Street crusade rather dramatically last month, leveraging the committee’s authority over the commodities market to advance a provision to regulate trading by commercial banks in risky derivatives.

(See 10 ideas for the next 10 years.)

At the same time, she has been in a firefight with Halter, 49, a former Clinton Administration official and Rhodes scholar whom Lincoln dubbed “Dollar Bill” to highlight his service on several corporate boards. Perhaps the lowest moment of an all-around dispiriting campaign came when a vaguely named group of undisclosed origins ran an anti-Halter ad featuring actors speaking in Indian accents thanking him for outsourcing jobs. Lincoln condemned the ad, but veteran columnist John Brummett has pronounced her the “guiltier party” in a campaign he calls “a classic case study in the decline of modern political discourse.”

Read “Are Democrats Screwed in 2010?”

See TIME’s conversation with Bill Clinton.

See TIME’s 50 authentic American experiences.

Lincoln insists that she is more sinned against than sinning. She believes that her efforts to walk the tightrope down the middle in a hyper-partisan era have made her the target of big-spending interest groups. Halter’s challenge has been fueled by more than $5 million from labor unions and the online left, which rebelled at Lincoln’s stands against the public option for health insurance, the proposed cap-and-trade strategy for controlling carbon emissions and card-check voting in union-recognition elections. But his campaign might never have sprouted had the ground not been plowed by conservative groups. Last fall, the right poured as much as $7 million into pressuring Lincoln on health care, which has weakened her for this year’s general election. That worked: in head-to-head matchups with leading Republican contenders, Lincoln trails them all, barely touching 40% in polls.

Halter trails Lincoln among likely primary voters but may be in a position to force her into a runoff. He argues that he can better tap the anti-incumbent mood in a matchup against the Republican front-runner, Representative John Boozman. The Democratic Party hierarchy, however, is closing ranks behind Lincoln. President Obama and former President Bill Clinton — an Arkansan — have both released ads praising the Senator, and First Lady Michelle Obama appeared to snub Halter during a recent appearance in Pine Bluff.

This isn’t Lincoln’s first brush with wrathful voters. Raised on a rice plantation along the Mississippi River near Memphis, Lincoln was first elected to Congress in 1992 as the House member from Northeastern Arkansas. She was among the freshmen Democrats who narrowly passed Clinton’s economic plan, which raised taxes and helped Republicans to a landslide in 1994. “I’ve taken the hard votes and I have the scars to prove it,” she says. Having won 70% of the vote in 1992, Lincoln eked by with 53% two years later. In 1996, she left Congress to give birth to her twin sons.

(See a photo gallery of memorable State of the Union moments.)

A Senate seat opened up two years later, with the retirement of Democrat Dale Bumpers. Lincoln’s easy victory in a low-turnout race made her the youngest woman ever elected to the Senate. She was 38. Despite that fact, she is now, in a sense, a 20th century politician in a 21st century pickle, a skilled navigator of the midstream at a time when technology has made it easier to organize around ideological extremes. She has fallen into the trap of the overmoderate politician. By trying to make everyone a little bit happy, Lincoln may not have made anyone happy enough. She’s too Democratic for Republicans, but not enough for the Democratic base.

“There’s just a lot of national groups that are using this race to make points,” Lincoln ventures. She’s not just a candidate, she believes, but a symbol, and both sides want to make an example of her. Last fall’s onslaught was intended to scare moderate Democrats into blocking health care reform: “They were bashing me for voting in favor of” the Senate health care bill, which did not include the public option, she says. At the same time, her failure to embrace the House version brought on the barrage from the left.

(See the Cartoons of the Week.)

“One side beats me up for doing it, and the other side beats me up for not doing enough of it,” she says. In Arkansas, which is neither red nor blue, that doesn’t have to be a problem, though. Its politicians have succeeded for generations by playing both ends against the middle. (In the Clinton era, it was called triangulation.) The real danger for Lincoln — and for her colleagues this year — is getting beat up just for being in Washington.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

See the world’s most influential people in the 2010 TIME 100.