But as that fateful tally approaches, Lincoln is at last feeling serious pressure from Democrats as well. The man who brought the free clinic to Little Rock -- along with "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann -- is Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who could be encouraged to enter a primary against her should she uphold the Republican filibuster. A former Clinton administration official and Rhodes scholar, Halter raised his profile by establishing a popular statewide lottery, with proceeds dedicated to education.

When Halter was asked on "Countdown" whether he might run for Lincoln's seat, he didn't say no. No doubt he knows that the activists who belong to Moveon.org and Democrats for America have vowed to raise millions of dollars to support a primary opponent for Lincoln unless she votes for cloture.

Lincoln's position is especially perilous at the moment because no matter what she says or does, her ratings seem to decline. Back in July, she wrote an Op-Ed essay on healthcare reform for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the state's largest daily newspaper, indicating that she supported "real" reform, including either "a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals as those of a public plan." In that same essay she went on to berate "the opponents of reform, who have no real plan for improving health care," for reviving the "tired arguments of the past," with their warnings about "a Washington takeover of health care which will raise your taxes, get between you and your doctor, and eliminate private insurance." She warned Arkansans not to be misled by those who would use such "misinformation" to stimulate fear and block change.

But as her poll numbers plummeted and her position shifted sharply to the right, Lincoln herself quickly became a purveyor of misinformation, particularly concerning the public option. In a September speech at the University of Arkansas medical school, the senator described a bill that does not exist. "For some in my caucus, when they talk about a public option they're talking about another entitlement program, and we can't afford that right now as a nation," she said. "I'm not going to vote for a bill that's not deficit-neutral, and I'm not going to vote for a bill that doesn't do something about curbing the cost in the out years, because it would be pointless ... I would not support a solely government-funded public option."

As Lincoln certainly knows by now, because she claims to have read every page of the pending bills, the public option is neither an entitlement nor solely government-funded, but is to be financed with premiums from its beneficiaries. As for the cost of reform, she also knows that the Senate bill saves hundreds of billions of dollars over the next two decades, according to Congressional Budget Office scoring.

Running away from reform, Lincoln looked weak rather than thoughtful, and cowardly rather than centrist. Her numbers have not improved, and the Republicans are mocking her as a flip-flopper. The damage to her standing among Democrats could make the difference on Election Day, because many voters who pulled the lever for her in 2004 will simply fail to show up. A Democratic state senator who has supported Lincoln in the past told me that she recently sent a message to Lincoln's office: Healthcare is a "line in the sand," not just another issue.

It was Bill Clinton who uttered the most pungent criticism of 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.

Hadassah Lieberman has long billed herself as an advocate for women's health, even when her corporate career scarcely justified that description. But in her current position as a "global ambassador" at Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world's biggest breast cancer charity, the senator's wife is indeed serving a worthy cause.

According to a Komen official, her role as a global ambassador includes "speaking engagements, networking in the public and private sectors, and direct engagement in the areas where we work," as well as supporting the efforts of the organization's "Global Promise Fund," which raises money to support Komen's efforts around the world. (Last summer she co-hosted a fundraising lunch at the Republican National Convention that raised eyebrows.) The same spokesperson indicated that Hadassah Lieberman is "not an employee" of Komen, meaning that she isn't paid, although her husband's 2008 Senate financial disclosure shows that she received "more than $1000" from the charity. 

But whatever Hadassah actually does for Komen, the question that women might ask is whether she brings its important messages home to Joe. Has she explained, for instance, that thousands of uninsured and underinsured women die every year because so many don't get timely preventive care or treatment for their cancers? Has she pointed out that healthcare reform is of special importance to women, cancer patients and cancer survivors? Did she tell him why her organization is demanding the same health insurance reforms -- such as guaranteed provision of coverage and elimination of preexisting condition limitations -- that his Republican allies are determined to prevent?

The easiest way for Hadassah to educate Joe on these matters would be to direct him to the Web site of the Komen Advocacy Alliance, which outlines the benefits of healthcare reform for breast cancer patients and survivors. Without taking a position on the public option, Komen decries the fact that 46 million Americans have no insurance and clearly endorses guaranteed and affordable health coverage for all. During the congressional recess last August, the organization urged its supporters to lobby hard for universal coverage and strong regulation of the insurance industry.

Healthcare reform, argue the Komen advocates, must require the insurance companies to "offer health insurance to everyone even if they are waging an expensive battle with cancer," and to make sure that they "cannot charge higher premiums because of a person's preexisting condition or current health status," or drop coverage "if someone becomes seriously ill and must renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays his or her premium in full." Aside from stopping the public option, these reforms are precisely what the Republicans hope their friend from Connecticut will help them to kill.

When Lieberman appeared on "Face the Nation" last Sunday, he reiterated his position that stopping reform altogether would be better than passing a bill with the public option. "Nothing is better than getting that," he  said. "We ought to follow the doctors' oath and say, 'First, let's do no harm.' "

But doing nothing is doing grave harm, as the ladies at Komen would sharply remind him. "Early detection is the key to survival," notes their healthcare reform site. "When breast cancer is detected early, the five-year survival rate is 98 percent" -- but "those who are uninsured or underinsured are more likely to skip potentially life-saving cancer screenings." The National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, which serves such women, lacks enough funding to screen 80 percent of them -- and even for women with insurance, co-payments can discourage screenings that would save lives. That is why the Komen position paper insists that insurers "must cover services like mammography and Pap smears with little or no cost-sharing for patients," in contrast to the Republican position that would allow the insurance companies to eliminate such mandates.

Like any supportive husband, Joe Lieberman shows up at Komen events, such as the organization's Race for the Cure in Manhattan last September. No doubt he thinks that breast cancer is bad and that his wife's work against it is good. But his current pandering to the insurance and drug lobbies -- which used to pay her -- cuts directly against the work she is doing today.

Ironically enough, Hadassah Lieberman was out of the country, on a working trip with Komen founder Nancy Brinker, when her husband started barking about a filibuster. (Even more ironically, she was traveling in Israel, a nation that has enjoyed a European-style universal healthcare system for many years, partially subsidized by American taxpayers and supported by politicians of all parties.)

Now that she's back in town, perhaps Hadassah will do something that could help women far more than any photo op or speech (and far more than anything she did when she worked for Hill & Knowlton, Apco Associates or Pfizer). She needs to tell her husband that if he cares about women's health, he will get out of the way of healthcare reform. 

The Lieberman family's financial ties to the health industry are no secret, yet their full extent remains unknown. During her husband's 2006 reelection campaign, Hadassah Lieberman's employment as a "senior counselor" to Hill & Knowlton, one of the world’s biggest lobbying firms, briefly erupted as an issue, especially because the clients she served were in the controversial pharmaceutical and insurance sectors. Exactly what she did for those clients has never been disclosed.

At the time she joined the public relations and lobbying conglomerate in the spring of 2005, she expressed the touching hope that she would somehow be able to help those in need. "I have had a lifelong commitment to helping people gain better healthcare," she said in a press release. "I am excited about the opportunity to work with the talented team at Hill & Knowlton to counsel a terrific stable of clients toward that same goal." Less than a year later, having pocketed $77,000 in salary, she quit without explanation -- just as her husband was facing a tough primary that he would eventually lose. Throughout the campaign, Hadassah Lieberman, her husband and their spokespersons explicitly refused to discuss her professional activities, except to note that she had not been required to register as a lobbyist.

But her stint at Hill & Knowlton was merely one episode in a professional lifetime devoted to the corporate health sector. For most of the past three decades, Hadassah Lieberman has been employed by either pharmaceutical companies or the lobbying firms that represent them -- starting with nearly a decade in the "public affairs department" at Hoffman-LaRoche from 1972-81, followed by stints at Pfizer, where she spent four years as "director of policy, planning and communications," and APCO Associates, a major lobbying firm where she served as a "senior associate" in its large healthcare division before retiring in 1998.

She went back to work when she joined H&K, an outfit that became notorious for its billion-dollar defense of the tobacco industry. Not long after her contract began, Sen. Lieberman introduced legislation vastly extending patent protection for pharmaceutical companies -- notably including GlaxoSmithKline, a top client of his wife's firm.

The best that can be said about the Lieberman family's conflict of interest is that it appears to have ended in 2005 -- while the Bayh family continues to collect enormous amounts of money from the same health insurance and drug companies that will benefit from her husband’s actions. Indeed, the smell of ethical rot arising from the Bayh household is even worse than the self-serving aroma that surrounds the Liebermans.

Susan Bayh was invited to join the board of Wellpoint back in 1998, when the Indiana-based company was still called Anthem Insurance and had not yet completed the mergers that made it the largest health insurer in America (and gave it monopoly status in many regions of the country). According to her official biography on Wellpoint's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, her qualifications to sit on the board of a billion-dollar corporation were minimal, to put it politely. She was 38 years old, teaching law at a local university, with limited experience as a corporate attorney at Eli Lilly & Co., the big pharmaceutical company that is also headquartered in Indiana. But then her husband, Evan, after two terms as governor, had just been elected to the United States Senate.

Susan Bayh's compensation from Wellpoint, including the stock options that she has exercised repeatedly over the past 10 years, has reached an estimated $2 million, including last year's director salary of over $300,000. She is the only director who, according to the most recent SEC filing, actually owns no shares in the company, because she sells as soon as her options become available. In January 2007, she exercised her options to acquire 3,333 shares of Wellpoint for an estimated cost of $147,000 -- and sold them the same day for an estimated price of $260,000, netting a tidy sum of $113,000. She repeated the same process five months later for a net profit of $136,000, and then seven months after that, selling another 1,430 shares for $123,000. That represented profits of nearly $400,000 on top of her salary.

Evidently Susan Bayh is most interested in accumulating wealth, and so far she has done a fine job. The Bayhs are now worth somewhere between $5 million and $10 million, an amount that was not scrimped from Evan's salary in the Senate. In 2007 he reassured a Fort Wayne newspaper in sonorous tones that sounded Liebermanesque: "I can honestly tell you that if my wife did not have a job, none, I can't think of a single decision I've made that would be any different. I look at what's best for our state and our country and my own conscience. My integrity matters more to me than anything, so I always do what's right for the people who put their trust in me."

Compared with Bayh's lucre from Wellpoint and the other corporations whose boards she graces, the earnings of Hadassah Lieberman appear paltry. Yet even though she has retired, for now, from counseling the pharma and insurance industries, the devotion to public health she has long proclaimed is still tinged with hypocrisy. Upon leaving Hill & Knowlton, Hadassah joined Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world’s largest breast cancer charity, as a paid "ambassador." Again, it isn't clear what she does besides posing for photo ops in places from Brazil to Israel, but as a Komen advocate she is supposed to be trying to prevent women from losing their lives.

So perhaps someone should point out to her what will happen if her husband kills healthcare reform this year. Millions of uninsured and underinsured women will continue to delay or simply fail to get preventive medical care, including mammography, because they cannot afford those procedures. Thousands of them will die as a direct result of that foregone care, just as thousands die each year from lack of insurance. The swiftest way to save those women from breast cancer is health insurance reform -- and the filibuster will be their death sentence. 

To understand what is going on today, it is essential to remember that where Ailes came from, "Nixonian" was not an insult but a badge of honor -- and seething hatred and even persecution of the press, rather than mere criticism, was a way of life.

Whatever the merits or defects of the strategy pursued by Obama's communications office in pushing back against Fox News, the furious backlash inside the Beltway is badly overwrought. Mainstream defenders of the conservative cable channel suddenly seem to be afflicted with a strange amnesia, causing them to forget not just the numerous episodes of partisan distortion that have permanently pocked its reputation, but the dirty war against the press and the First Amendment that was waged by the Nixon gang in the late '60s and early '70s. That lost memory does a disservice to journalism and history.

In a sense, Fox News Channel has never been able to overcome its nature as the offspring of Ailes, notoriously one of the angriest, toughest Republican consultants in politics, and Rupert Murdoch, the ruthless mogul whose political abuse of his news outlets became legendary long before he entered the cable news business. The objective for Ailes, as for Murdoch, is not fairness or balance; the objective is always to win by whatever means necessary. That includes marketing himself and his employees as high-minded truth-seekers and innocent victims of snotty liberalism -- much in the mode of old Nixon.

Yet neither Ailes nor his employees can always control themselves enough to hide their bias, as the world discovered last year when the Fox News boss uttered a revealing quip about the man who would become president. "[I]t is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don't know if it's true that President Bush called [Pakistan President Pervez] Musharraf and said: 'Why can't we catch this guy?' " Ailes chortled at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television News Directors Association as he accepted their "First Amendment" award. His joke followed a lengthy series of "reports" on Fox News promoting the idea that the young Obama had attended a Muslim madrassa -- presumably to be trained for jihad -- in Indonesia.

The list of similar offenses is almost endless and, as it grows every day, selecting the most egregious examples can be challenging. Back in 2004, the wife of Carl Cameron, the channel's top campaign reporter, worked in the Bush reelection campaign, and Cameron himself posted material mocking Democratic nominee John Kerry. Over the years, the channel's news director John Moody has sent dozens of memos to the reporting staff, often tinged with GOP talking points, meant to ensure that whatever they produce has a pro-Republican slant.

With the advent of Glenn Beck as the prophet of protest, however, the drumbeat of partisan paranoia on Fox News is growing much louder. The cable channel heavily promoted the Beck-inspired Sept. 12 Tea Party protests against the Obama administration, with highly favorable live reports from Fox News correspondents, anchored by ... Beck himself.

In short, the Obama White House has ample reason to question whether Fox News Channel is a news organization that can be expected to treat a Democratic administration with fairness and balance. All they have accomplished so far is to inflame the right-wing base and renew the alliance of the Clinton era between right-wing media and mainstream outlets. Pundits and producers who claim to see no difference between their own outlets and Fox News are certainly entitled to express their opinions (and to insult themselves and their colleagues) as they see fit. But when they join the Fox chorus lumping Obama with Nixon, they need to be corrected.

Over the past few days, that false comparison has been made by Ken Rudin, the political director of National Public Radio, who called the Obama White House "Nixonesque"; by Karl Rove, who played a bit role in the Watergate saga as a Young Republican dirty trickster; and by Ruth Marcus, who likened Obama to both Nixon and his attack dog Vice President Spiro Agnew in the Washington Post -- a place where ignorance of the true history of the Nixon era is inexcusable. (Update: Ken Rudin emailed to make sure I saw his apology for the Nixon reference, which he called a "bone-headed mistake;" you can read about it here.)

But ignorance is epidemic on Capitol Hill and in the capital's newsrooms, so let's say this very simply: Nothing that Obama or any of his aides has done or said remotely resembles the war on the press waged by the Nixon White House until Watergate ended that administration's assaults on the Constitution. Nobody has sent Joe Biden out to question the patriotism of reporters and columnists who criticize the president, as Agnew did repeatedly. And nobody has tried to intimidate the media with obscene threats and tax audits, in the Mafia style of Nixon's aides.

On Fox News, the aggrieved correspondents, crackpots and crybabies now claim to be on an Obama White House "enemies list." Perhaps they mean to use the term metaphorically, but in the Nixon White House there was an actual list, compiled by Chuck Colson at the behest of John Dean. In August 1971, Dean wrote a memo explaining that such a list was needed "to maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be more active in their opposition to our administration." This meant using "the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."

Among those present on the original enemies list (which later morphed into a much longer second list) was Daniel Schorr, the eminent reporter who then worked for CBS News and now provides sage commentary on NPR. (Perhaps he can have a word with Rudin.) So Fox should stop whining about Nixon until a similar memo turns up bearing the name of Rahm Emanuel or Patrick Gaspard.

The Nixon gang began to go after journalists within months after the old reprobate took office and never stopped. In 1969, Dean ordered the Internal Revenue Service to initiate an audit of Newsday investigative reporter and editor Bob Greene, to avenge a series he had written probing the business deals of Nixon crony Bebe Rebozo. Then came the enemies list, which included Schorr and other journalists who were scheduled for similar harassment. During the 1972 campaign, Nixon aides hired Lucianne Goldberg (later the confidante of Lewinsky taper Linda Tripp) to spy on reporters aboard the press plane of Democratic nominee George McGovern. For a thousand dollars a week, she posed as a reporter for the Women's News Service, gathering salacious gossip for Nixon, mostly about who was sleeping with the stewardesses.

Lucianne's buffoonish spy caper only serves as a counterpoint to the far more sinister assaults on the Washington Post, which mounted in thuggish excess as the Watergate scandal unfolded. Marcus and her misguided colleagues could benefit from the educational account of those year provided by the late Katharine Graham in her memoir, "Personal History":

The investigation of such a tangled web of crime, money, and mischief was made much harder given the unveiled threats and harassment by a president and his administration. Bearing the full brunt of presidential wrath is always disturbing. Sometimes I wondered if we could survive four more years of this kind of strain.

The threats most famously included Attorney General John Mitchell's screaming warning to Bob Woodward that "Katie Graham is going to get her tit caught in a big, fat wringer" if the Post continued to investigate Watergate. But the campaign against the Post went much further. Nixon tried to persuade Richard Mellon Scaife (yes, the billionaire nemesis of Clinton) to buy the Post. On the White House tapes, he told aides that the Post would have "damnable problems" getting FCC license renewals for its Florida broadcasting properties -- and then two Nixon business cronies challenged the Post licenses, costing the company millions of dollars and precipitating a fall in its stock. Friends with administration ties warned Graham of possible violence against her.

Through those years, Graham held up bravely under incredible pressure until her paper triumphed. She is gone, but we all still owe her a debt of gratitude for courage under truly Nixonian fire -- along with the editors and reporters she supported. The bogus comparisons between those days and now are a dishonor to her memory and to the tradition of public service that she came to represent. 

Yet as the nation prepares for a possible swine flu pandemic this winter, we are learning that the firm determination of both parties to deny medical care to people without papers is actually quite flaccid. Even the most hysterical immigrant-bashers seem content to allow the government to vaccinate immigrants against the H1N1 virus (unless, that is, they happen to be among the right-wing chorus that suspects vaccination itself to be a nefarious socialist plot). Even they seem to realize that viruses don't discriminate on the basis of citizenship -- although they wrongly tried to blame last spring's first outbreak of swine flu on the Mexicans among us.

Rather timidly, President Obama has suggested that the children of illegal immigrants might have to be considered an exception to the rule, since they will inevitably come in contact with the offspring of legal citizens. He didn't explain how unvaccinated and infected adults would avoid contact with their own children, or how they would avoid passing the virus on to the people they serve in the businesses and industries that employ them by the millions. And of course, the Centers for Disease Control is wisely ignoring such invidious distinctions and is now urging everyone, regardless of status, to get vaccinated as soon as the medication is available.

That everyone tolerates the current emergency exception, regardless of ideology, reveals much about the furious resistance to healthcare for the undocumented. Public health experts and many health economists have always considered that bipartisan opposition to be stupid as well as cruel. Not only would we protect ourselves and our children from communicable diseases more effectively if everyone had access to insurance and regular care, regardless of status, but we might even be able to reduce the rising cost of insurance (and diminish the attractiveness of hiring illegal workers).

So let us consider the strange moral perspective of the nativists and the politicians who serve as their echoes. According to them, it is wholly permissible to let the "illegals" and their children suffer from illness and even die prematurely, so long as their condition poses no threat to the rest of us. To those who consider healthcare a human right rather than a privilege of wealth, this is obviously an outrage. But even those who reject the ideals of solidarity and Scripture suddenly worry about their neighbors when a cough or a sneeze, on a bus or in a restaurant, can threaten them and their families.

The problem with that easy moral exception is that the effects of persecution don't fade away so conveniently. When the same people who have been trying to round you up and put you and your family in a detention camp abruptly put on a smiley face and urge you to come in for a vaccination -- promising not to place you under arrest this time -- they have no credibility.

More to the point, many cases of serious communicable disease, such as flu or tuberculosis, tend to be discovered by doctors during routine examinations, or when patients show up complaining of symptoms that seem unrelated. So protecting public health is accomplished far more effectively when everyone has insurance coverage and receives regular preventive care.

Among the most ironic aspects of the debate over truly universal coverage is that allowing undocumented workers to buy into a public option or an insurance exchange system would almost certainly reduce costs for everyone. That's because illegal workers actually tend to be younger and healthier than average, and because many of them return to their home countries before they become old enough to make major demands on the health system. (The same principle applies to Social Security, a system supported by contributions from undocumented workers who never draw any benefits from it.)

In other countries, most notably under France's excellent system, the public is smart enough to protect itself from disease and compassionate enough to protect all within their nation's borders. Too bad we only seem able to achieve that level of wisdom when we think we have glimpsed the apocalypse.