As a life-long resident of Indianapolis, I have voted for Dick Lugar on numerous occasions.
He was our mayor for two terms, from 1968 to 1976. He helped put Indianapolis on solid financial footing by working to push Unigov through the the state legislature.
In 1976 he was elected to his first term as a Senator from Indiana. He distinguished himself in the Senate, and won re-election handily for the next 30 years.
Lugar did a fine job of representing us during his first three or four terms. He had organized an efficient staff. Constituent letters were always answered promptly (in noticeable contrast to Evan Bayh, whose staff never replied to any of my correspondence).
In years past, Senator Lugar gained a reputation for expertise in foreign affairs, and he did a lot of good work serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He was a Center-Right Republican, and established a reasonably conservative voting record. His overall rating with the American Conservative Union was 64%, which was a bit tepid for an Indiana Republican, but he enjoyed a 75% rating from the National Right to Life Committee for his generally strong pro-life voting record.
Unfortunately, Senator Lugar stayed in Washington two terms too long, and morphed into a RINO (Republican in name only).
As so often happens to politicians, the extended stay in Washington gave Senator Lugar just too much time to drink the Kool-Aid, and he began to behave more like a Washington insider than a representative of "we the people" back home in Indiana.
My misgivings about Dick Lugar began in earnest years ago when he supported the new START treaty with Russia, and they intensified while observing his dogged determination to keep pushing the long-debated Law of the Sea treaty. Both of these concoctions are viewed with alarm by most conservatives as unnecessary give-aways of our present strategic advantages and our sovereignty.
Finally, Senator Lugar pushed us conservatives over the edge in 2009 with his vote to approve Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's first wacko leftist appointment to the Supreme Court.
He rubbed our noses in it again in 2010 when he supported the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kegan, arguably an even more radical leftist than Sotomayer.
So when Indiana State Treasurer and local Tea Party hero Richard Mourdock (the man who stood up to Obama's plan to rip-off the state pension funds that had invested in Chrysler bonds, and who took it all the way to the Supreme Court in spite of tremendous political and media opposition) announced that he was running against Lugar in the primary, my conservative heart leapt with joy.
Finally, we had a real alternative to Senator Lugar. We had a conservative with backbone who could represent us in the Senate. For most Indiana conservatives, the decision was a no-brainer.
Apparently, many Hoosier Republicans felt the same way, and Mourdock defeated the six-term incumbent in a landslide -- 69% to 31%.
The hand-wringing of the mainstream media began immediately. Liberal politicians gave interviews bemoaning the departure of Senator Lugar and his "bi-partisan philosophy" which made him so easy for liberal senators to work with. The Senate would now become even more polarized by crazy conservative ideologues.
When your political defeat is mourned by the likes of John Kerry and Harry Reid, what does that tell you? It tells me that you are one big kahuna of a RINO.
After his concession speech, Senator Lugar took a parting shot at Mr. Mourdock by releasing a written statement to the press castigating Mourdock's uncompromising adherence to conservative principles. One of the more pungent of those sour grapes was this excerpt:
"If Mr. Mourdock is elected, I want him to be a good Senator. But that will require him to revise his stated goal of bringing more partisanship to Washington. He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate."Well, I'm sorry, Senator Lugar. We didn't elect Richard Mourdock to do what you did. Doing what you did is why you lost. We elected Richard Mourdock to help turn our wayward Senate back towards long-established Constitutional principles of limited government.
The fact that you don't get that perfectly illustrates your problem.
We didn't leave you, Senator Lugar. You left us.
