Dept. of Corrections

LITTLE ROCK — WE ARE indebted to our regular correspondent, Alert Reader, for pointing out that the question Blanche Lincoln dodged in her debate the other day with John Boozman, her opponent in this year’s race for the U.S. Senate in Arkansas, was not whether she’d voted for Obamacare. She could have answered the question either way and still been right, since the legislative history of that 2,000-page horse-choker of a bill was so tricky it involved more than one vote. And she voted at least two different ways at different times. (Miss Blanche can be a slippery customer.)

But the question the senator never answered directly was whether she’d vote for Obamacare again, and one can understand why she would hesitate to answer it:

If she’d said she wouldn’t support it now, she’d be admitting her judgment was mistaken-and how. For the consequences of Obamacare for patients and physicians, the insured and insurers, hospitals and health plans of all kinds, employers and employees, businessmen and taxpayers, the federal deficit and the American economy. . . are only just now coming into play, and they promise/threaten to be wideranging.

To take responsibility for having played any role in foisting this misshapen thing on the country would be a serious admission, and indeed Senator Lincoln is already trying, unsuccessfully, to change important provisions of it. To back away from her past support of it would come too close to confessing she’d been wrong. On a monumental scale.

Then again, if she said she’d do it all over again, that would indicate she was simply ineducable on the subject, and unable to admit a mistake-and a beaut of one. Which would be even worse.

———

Meanwhile, another alert reader has informed us that we should have said that Monmouth County, New Jersey, where the trees for the memorial garden at the new World Trade Center have been grown, is just across the Hudson rather than the East River from lower Manhattan. Oh, of course. We must have got turned around. We always do in New York City.

Just where and how many times the East River flows into the Hudson, or whether they’re real rivers or more properly called estuaries of the Atlantic at one point, long has been a mystery to us. Maybe it would have been safer to refer to all that water as New York Bay/Harbor. But if so, should that have been the upper or lower Bay, and just where do the Narrows and Verrazano Bridge fit in? You got us-we’re strangers in those distant parts.

But this much is clear: We’re much obliged to close readers. They help keep us straight, or at least confused on a much higher level.