So, Will Lugar Be The New Murkowski?

Posted on | May 2, 2012 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

Legal Insurrection points to some National Journal polling showing Tea Party favorite Mourdock in a statistical dead heat. Politico notes:

The Lugar campaign’s 3-to-1 spending advantage has allowed it to portray Mourdock as an untrustworthy tax cheat who has “sold out to D.C. outsiders,” practices “the politics of personal destruction” and “will say anything to get elected.”

As Doug Ross has pointed out, incumbency, if not the source of our woes, sure packs a heavy correlation with them. Next Tuesday’s GOP primary in Indiana promises to be a humdinger. The question on my mind is, if Lugar gets beat, will he run as an independent, a la Lisa Murkowski? I figure Lugar will, because hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Richard Mourdock for Senate

Aside: is Twitter toast?

Category: Indiana

Comments

26 Responses to “So, Will Lugar Be The New Murkowski?”

JollyMan
May 2nd, 2012 @ 9:29 pm

My understanding is Indiana has a “sore loser” law.

Regardless, the problem in Alaska was that Joe Miller had absolutely no business running for the US Senate, and was something of a weirdo to boot.

Mourdock though, is actually a proven vote getter and a quality candidate. I don’t see too many Republicans jumping ship to write in Lugar (if that’s allowed)

My advice to anti-establishment, tea-party conservatives is nominate QUALITY candidates like Mourdock when you want to take on the Establishment, and do it in safe, Republican states like Indiana.
McGehee
May 2nd, 2012 @ 9:43 pm

Alaska ain’t purple…
ThePaganTemple
May 2nd, 2012 @ 9:45 pm

It’s time for Lugar to go. Hopefully, if he’s beaten in the primary, he’ll have enough dignity and self-respect to understand he’s no longer wanted, and he’ll retire with a modicum of his dignity intact. He’s too damned old anyway. The world has passed him by, along with his governing philosophy. He just hasn’t accepted it yet, that people are sick of these bi-partisan cut-throats who can never pass up the opportunity to reach across the aisle to screw us all.
richard mcenroe
May 2nd, 2012 @ 10:10 pm

That’s WHEN will he ull a Murlowski, not will he?
KingShamus
May 2nd, 2012 @ 10:26 pm

Dick Lugar before he dicks you.

Also: Twitter isn’t toast, but it is getting a little crispy around the edges.
Pathfinder's wife
May 2nd, 2012 @ 10:27 pm

As a person who can see Indiana from my house (on a clear day…from a high tree), not sure Lugar and the word “dignity” belong together.

I just hope the grasping old vulture doesn’t decide to move west…we have enough troubles as it is.
JollyMan
May 2nd, 2012 @ 10:28 pm

And it’s also not “Tea-Party” conservative, Miller was not a good fit for the state.

My point though about conservatives picking safe Republican states to run anti-establishment candidates was in reference to the train wreck in Delaware with Christine O’Donnell who went on to lose by 20 points to a Democrat who referred to himself as a bearded Marxist that now has a Senate seat for life.

They really showed the Establishment there, didn’t they?
Dewayne
May 2nd, 2012 @ 10:37 pm

Per law, Lugar can’t run as anything other than a Repub. He’s toast.
ThePaganTemple
May 2nd, 2012 @ 10:38 pm

She might have done better if assholes like Karl Rove had endorsed her, instead of dissing her like he did. And the same with that fucking Mike Castle. If I were living in Delaware and voting in the next election and he was running against Chris Coons, I would be tempted to vote for the bearded Marxist out of pure spite. And there were plenty of others who failed to endorse her, or outright refused, going all the way up the ladder to the RNC. The wonder is she did as good as she did.

To Mitt’s credit, he did endorse O’Donnell, something I think he deserves a hell of a lot more credit for than he gets here.
JollyMan
May 2nd, 2012 @ 10:50 pm

Really?

Do you really think Karl Rove as a pundit on Fox News carried that much weight with Delaware voters?

If Democrat pundit Bob Beckel said something bad about Chris Coons, would he also have lost by 20 points?

Senate candidates don’t win or lose entire states based on a single political pundit’s opinion.

And for the record, Rove was right about O’Donnell. She was a con artist that had run as 3rd Party candidate previously.

Castle may have been a moderate, but I’d rather have a Scott Brown type Republican than a Barbara Boxer Democrat.

You take what you can get in the Northeast.
demsaresatanic
May 2nd, 2012 @ 10:54 pm

I wish I lived in Indiana so I could vote for Lugar! Yes, he does look like a cross between Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi — but nobody’s perfect. Just look at me!
Anyway I’ve been trying to convince my friends over at RedState that Lugar is the best option for Indiana. For some reason I’m not getting far with them. Oppositional bunch over there.
Charles
May 2nd, 2012 @ 11:29 pm

You can’t tag Lisa Murkowski or Joe Lieberman as sore losers when they ran as independents and won their elections (Senate, that is).

Insurgent candidacies are fine, but the insurgents often forget they need the mainstream voters too.
ThePaganTemple
May 2nd, 2012 @ 11:35 pm

If it was only Rove, I’d agree with you, but it wasn’t just him, it was the entire Republican establishment. It was only when she started climbing in the polls that they reluctantly endorsed her because they knew they were starting to smell like day old diarrhea.

But the main culprit was Mike Castle. Fuck that piece of shit. If Castle had won the primary, I have no doubt O’Donnell would have endorsed him and supported him, but that big fucking crybaby openly said he would not support her. He’s one of these entitled pricks that don’t deserve to win a seat, for the simple fact he’s forgotten what it means. An elected official in America is a public servant, not some aristocratic cocksucker to the manor born. So fuck him. I don’t think I could bring myself to vote for Coons, so I just wouldn’t vote at all.
ThePaganTemple
May 2nd, 2012 @ 11:39 pm

Wait a minute, it just now hit me what this old grey haired faggot said about Mourdock-

“sold out to D.C. outsiders,”

DC OUTSIDERS? In other words, Tea Party conservatives who want to restore sound fiscal policy and conservative small government is a “DC Outsider” as opposed to this senile old fucking fool, a DC Insider. That’s got to take some fucking gall.
JollyMan
May 3rd, 2012 @ 12:12 am

Considering O’Donnell ran as a 3rd Party previously, no, I don’t think for one minute she would have endorsed Castle had he won the GOP primary.

As far as why Castle didn’t endorse her, one big reason was her campaign insinuated he was a homosexual.

At some point, the Tea Party has to take responsibility for its failures. O’Donnell losing by 20 points had NOTHING to do with the mystical GOP Establishment not liking her.
Info
May 3rd, 2012 @ 12:17 am

Sure, O’Donnell has to take some of the hit for running a two-week moneybomb instead of coming out swinging (“I’m you”? Really???) HOWEVER, when she’s fighting the Donks and her own team is calling her nuts, that ain’t helping.
Info
May 3rd, 2012 @ 12:24 am

Yes, Indiana has a “sore loser” law. If you lose a primary, you can’t be in the general, even as a write-in. Lugar loses, he’s done.

Shed no tears for him. The man just turned 80, f’r Pete’s sake.
ThePaganTemple
May 3rd, 2012 @ 12:35 am

Yeah, its time for him to retire. I think a good way to get rid of these old bastards would be to require them to pass a competency test every time they ran for reelection after a certain age. It would have to be a test they would not know ahead of time, but the results would be automatically published in all the leading papers and on the net.

Some might whine that’s not fair, but there’s a good case to be made for making those of advanced age pass a driver’s test. Well, a driver is going to hurt only a limited number of people if he screws up. A Senator is making decisions that will affect every damn one of us. Is it too fucking much to expect that they should know that person staring at them in the bathroom mirror is not another person from another fucking dimension?

Shed tears for him? That old senile buffoon wouldn’t cross the street to pull you out of a fire unless there was a fucking camera crew there.
Adjoran
May 3rd, 2012 @ 2:08 am

Lugar has been playing the role of bipartisan foreign policy doyen, probably with the hope of landing the SecState job with a President of either party, since Reagan left office. Didn’t happen. He should have retired with grace and taken a big victory lap, got the bouquets, and a nice DC consulting job if he really didn’t want to retire.

Instead, he blew, overplayed his hand, and is going to lose. Mourdock was the top statewide vote-getter in the last election – he even out-polled Mitch Daniels.

I wish groups like the Young Guns would stay out of it instead of playing along with a negative primary campaign that is bound to lose.
Adjoran
May 3rd, 2012 @ 2:10 am

O/T, but I’m guessing Stacy was one of the “conservative bloggers” being wooed by Romney today in DC.
Wombat_socho
May 3rd, 2012 @ 2:55 am

From your lips to Mitt’s ears.
MrPaulRevere
May 3rd, 2012 @ 3:33 am

Very well said. There is nothing more pathetic than an individual clinging to power well into their 80’s. Gerontocracies suck.
Adjoran
May 3rd, 2012 @ 8:08 am

RSMc said he had an “important” meeting here, then tweeted that he was early at a DC location, all very mysterious. Then the story that Romney held an off-the-record meeting in DC with 60 conservative bloggers . . . I may not be Niels Bohr, but I can add two and two.

The only question is if Stacy has decided to join Team Mitt, or if they will take his sweater vest only when they wrench it from his cold, dead fingers.
Pathfinder's wife
May 3rd, 2012 @ 11:17 am

Well, she did get torpedoed.
Of course, she also torpedoed herself — coming off rather wacky, and worse yet, as a bit of a grifter (I got the impression that she would have been more than happy to have been a toadie for the establishment if she managed to get in…so there’s the big problem there, imhao…plus the wackiness).

COD isn’t a good template for fighting the establishment.
ThePaganTemple
May 3rd, 2012 @ 1:08 pm

He should jump on board team Mitt, but I have my doubts. I’m starting to wonder whether he was actually invited to that meeting and maybe if that might not have had something to do with the tone of that post.
hrh40
May 3rd, 2012 @ 1:35 pm

If you’re going to compare Lugar to Murky, it might be prudent to add an update about what happened to the Alaska GOP as this year’s convention.

To wit, the Ron Paul people ousted longtime, corrupt chairman Randy Ruedrich. And presumably, the Murky stronghold as well.