Yesterday they couldn’t spell ‘derivative’

This is the latest installment in a funny little story about how Wall Street bankers keep getting vexed at every turn by surely unwitting voters in a small rural state otherwise known for racial strife, Johnny Cash and Bill Clinton.

It's as if some old boys have come out of the timber woods in Arkansas to stand arms-folded in the doors of Wall Street bank swap shops, firmly telling the sissies in the suits to take it outside.

I developed this story three weeks ago when U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, centrist Democrat from Arkansas who is chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee, got pushed into a runoff by a candidate put in the race by national liberal and labor groups.

Because of her sudden vulnerability on the left to a guy with easy millions from labor and MoveOn.org, she felt obliged to avail herself of the agriculture chairmanship and its oversight of commodities futures trading. So she threw into the pending financial reform bill a left-field provision to force banks to move their derivatives operations completely out of the banks, physically and financially.

The White House, the Fed, the Treasury, the Senate liberal Democratic leadership -- they all thought the idea a bad one, politically at least, because it would agitate banks' opposition and potentially imperil more credible and palatable sections for stricter regulation.

But, because members of the incumbents' club protect each other, everyone agreed to let Lincoln have her little provision until she won her primary.

But then she didn't win her primary. Failing to get 50 percent on May 18, she was forced into this runoff three weeks later with the labor poster boy, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.

So the Senate went ahead and passed the bill with Lincoln's political security blanket in it. That sent the competing House and Senate versions to a conference committee. The Senate Democratic leadership named Lincoln to the conference.

Then the powers-that-be sat back and waited for what everyone expected.

That would be for the raging anti-incumbency wave to sink Lincoln in that runoff June 8, after which she wouldn't care anymore about swap shops and they could take her little section right out of the bill so they could move on with substantial but palatable financial reform.

So you're not going to believe what happened Tuesday.

Lincoln won the runoff, 52 percent to 48 percent, amid a backlash by Arkansas voters against national groups trying to use them as pawns to advance a national agenda.

Being a lifelong resident of this state in question and an observer of its politics, I feel safe in asserting that preserving the provision to spin off derivatives shops from Wall Street banks was not on the minds of more than three or four of the quarter-million persons who voted.

So now Lincoln goes back to Washington as the rare and heroic survivor of the anti-incumbency wave. Presumably she will take her seat at the conference committee and fight for protection of her provision -- not on merit, of course, but so that she could leverage the rhetoric of the populist left in her uphill battle this fall against her favored Republican challenger, Rep. John Boozman.

It appears that voters in Arkansas have gummed up the works for Washington and Wall Street, not once, but twice, and I can't stop laughing at the rich irony.

The kicker is that the White House could jerk this rug right out from under Lincoln and hardly anyone in Arkansas would notice, except when she came home to rail about how she did everything she could to fight Washington and Wall Street.

Send them a message, she'd say.

And the voters of Arkansas would say, OK, sure, we'll send a message. Then they'd ask, "What was that word again? Deriva-what?"

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.