Posted on 05/07/2012 5:43:31 AM PDT by cotton1706
ANDERSON, Ind. — Just days before his first competitive election since Gerald Ford was president, Dick Lugar is standing before a municipal power plant here extolling the value of his international Rolodex — a list he boasts is longer than that of “any other public servant in Congress.”
“We have, because of the years gone by, at least two world leaders coming through our office every week,” the six-term Republican senator told the small gathering of local energy leaders Friday afternoon in this county seat 40 miles northwest of Indianapolis. “Why does that make a difference? It makes a whole lot of difference. If you have a problem in Anderson or Pendleton, sometimes we can’t solve it domestically.”
To political operatives and observers, the pitch is emblematic of why Lugar is on the verge of becoming just the sixth GOP senator in more than 30 years to be toppled in a primary.
The 36-year incumbent — twice chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — appears out of sync with the prevailing issues of the day, careening between messages and naively shunning engagement with his insurgent opponent on the stump.
“His team approached it like it was a regular, circa-1995 environment,” said a Senate race strategist familiar with Indiana politics. “Ignore your opponent. If it gets close, you smack. But when he finally engaged, it looked desperate.”
Lugar’s closing argument to stave off surging Richard Mourdock — a two-term state treasurer backed by the tea party — has reeked of anguish.
As he relayed the gloomy results of the latest poll of the race — showing him down a staggering 10 percentage points — he acknowledged that “the press came … to have sort of a mourning or an obituary.”
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
His appeal to independents would seem to support this claim.
I laughed out loud at that one. I thought Burma was Myanmar now. Guess Myanmarese is too hard to say.
His home is in Mclean, Va. But I know what u mean.
He will propably join Trent Lott’s lobbying firm.
There was a kerfuffle in the newspapers but no one stepped forward to say he couldn't run, even without an Iowa homestead.
Clark was not reelected.
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