Richard Mourdock for U.S. Senate campaign video: It's time.... for Richard Mourdock. March 3, 2011, http://youtu.be/0EE8jJ2Jhu8
Richard Mourdock: Precursor or anomaly? Greg Garrison and Charlie Cook -separately- adroitly pinpoint where Sen. Richard Lugar eventually lost his way, started losing the trust of Hoosier voters, then lost in a landslide due to the dis-connect. Points largely lost on a predictably apoplectic Beltway MSM
The best reasoned analysis I've read thus far of why Sen. Lugar lost in the GOP primary last week -and lost badly- is by the one-and-only Charlie Cook last week and Breitbart.com's Greg Garrison today.
THE COOK REPORT
Lugar’s Downfall
Don’t just chalk up the Indiana Republican’s primary defeat to the tea party. It’s more complicated than that.
By Charlie Cook
Updated: May 11, 2012 | 1:39 p.m.
May 10, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.
One way to explain Sen. Richard Lugar’s loss to state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in this week’s Indiana Republican primary is to attribute it to a tea party takeover of the GOP. A second explanation is that a venerable public servant overstayed his welcome and ran for reelection one time too many. A third is that Lugar was too focused on international relations and grew too distant from his state—that he didn’t keep his political fences mended back home.
Read the rest of the column at
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Breitbart.com
LUGAR: 36 YEARS OF PUBLIC SERVICE
by Greg Garrison
May 16, 2012
He was 16 when I was born, Mayor of Indianapolis (my home town) when I was a student at IU, and off to the US Senate when I was a ripe old 28; been there ever since. And a few hours after having seen him take a beating most uncommon in American politics—he lost to Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock by 21 points in yesterday’s primary—the confetti has just stopped floating to the floor and empty beer cans have barely stopped rolling around as we look with mixed feelings at the phenomenon just experienced.
Read the rest of the post at:
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Both before and after I first moved to the Washington, D.C. area in 1988, where I lived and worked for 15 years, other than maybe Sam Nunn in Georgia, Daniel Inouye in Hawaii or Teddy Kennedy in Massachusetts, I don't think there was another senator more firmly linked in the minds of both voters and the local and national news media with their own home state than Dick Lugar was with Indiana, who was already a U.S. Senator when I first moved to Bloomington from North Miami Beach in August of 1979 for my freshman year at IU.
Then, and for 25 years afterwards, it was simply inconceivable for anyone who knew anything about Indiana politics and the people of the state to imagine any logical scenario where he would ever lose an election, even if he should've retired after his last term ended in 2006.
Thirty years was long enough, though, and lots of voters who had voted for Lugar their entire life had become disenchanted with both him, his policies and his increasingly-curious priority choices.
As I've mentioned here previously, too, I was actually at the televised Birch Bayh-Dan Quayle Senate debate at IU in 1980, sitting in the second row of sweltering Whittenberger Auditorium at the IMU, where I usually sat to watch films on weekend nights, glad to be somewhere where people cared about ideas and public policy, even if they weren't always the ones that I agreed with or thought were most logical or reasonable.
After growing-up in the completely unrepresentative South Florida of the 1970's, with no Black or Hispanic congressmen and everyone on the Dade County Commission voted in at-large, the best-case scenario for lobbyists, I was happy to be somewhere where every vote counted for something.
A place where actual political debates took place, even if they didn't exactly match the lofty rhetoric of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858; the election Lincoln lost in case you forgot, before he was elected president two years later.
On Election Night 1980, I spent a lot of time going from one place to another for various election return parties, on and off-campus, in retrospect, the news about Bayh losing to Quayle was merely the precursor.
I eventually made my way tothe dorm room of a friend there at Briscoe Quad where I lived that year, a friend who just happened to be the IU Student Association president.
As first, George McGovern, John Culver and other well-known Dems bit the dust, and then Reagan was acclaimed the winner over President Carter, the large crowd became the very personification of an election wake, filled with gallows humor -and clever remarks about someone making a race competitive by only losing by ten percentage points!
The next time I was in a place that Blue and sad following election returns was at The Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill for the mid-term 1994 elections, when I thought the GOP would take the House, but my friends on The Hill told me that my famous intuition was wrong, something it rarely was.
By the end of the night, many of my friends were actually crying real tears as they saw their always-interesting Capitol Hill jobs get eliminated before their eyes, when their bosses lost in the Gingrich Revolution, while people who for years had been on the Majority Staff of House committees realized that the new math would get them gone, in part, because of how they'd run things and treated the Republican staffers.
Karma, it's not just a chameleon.
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Howey Politics Indiana: http://howeypolitics.com/
NPR Audio: The Bigger Picture Of Indiana's Senate Race:
NPR's Scott Simon talks with Hoosier political analyst Brian Howey of the Howey Indiana Politics newletter about Richard Mourdock's landslide defeat of Sen. Richard Lugar last Tuesday in the GOP Senate primary
