The Specter-Sestak primary in Pennsylvania will probably grab most of the headlines over the next 48 hours. But the race I’m watching on Tuesday is the Lincoln-Halter primary in Arkansas.

I have nothing against Mr. Halter, the state’s lieutenant governor. In fact, I don’t know enough about him to offer either praise or criticism. But I am a big fan of Sen. Lincoln’s, and have been ever since I heard her speak at a convention I attended several years ago. I’ll never forget the anecdote she shared about the late Bill Emerson. I’ve retold it several times since.

In that anecdote and the votes she casts, Lincoln strikes me as a true centrist, principled and pragmatic. Consider this remark, cited in the NYT story linked above:

“We are an immediate-gratification society. People want these problems solved immediately, but they also don’t want to move too fast.”

She gets it. She understand that politics, like the rest of life, is a series of carefully considered compromises. We need more Blanche Lincoln’s in Congress, not fewer.

But voters today don’t seem to care. They don’t want carefully considered compromise. The want (or at least claim they want) unwavering consistency; perfect allegiance to ideological bromides, regardless of the consequences.

We bemoan hyper-partisanship in Washington. But we’re quick to forget — or perhaps ignore — the sad reality that we’re often the cause of hyper-partisanship.