Dick Lugar loses primary

ANTPogo said:
Nope. Your point was, and I quote, "Dick Lugar = Joe Lieberman".

And while that might be true on Planet Republican, here on Earth it's so far off the mark as to be pathetic.

EDIT: And go back and reread the wiki article. Lugar and Obama have been involved in bipartisan cooperation with each other since long before even the 2006 election. If his good relationship with Obama didn't cause Republican voters to ditch him in 2006 (he ran effectively unopposed), why did it suddenly cause them to ditch him now?

Free hint: it's not Lugar that changed.
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I can't understand how you keep missing the point; perhaps it is intentional, because you don't want to admit that the Democrats are just as intolerant of dissent as the Republicans.

Lieberman was a sitting senator ousted in 2006 by members of his own party in a primary battle. The ostensible reason was that he was considered too close to President Bush and the Republicans.

Lugar was a sitting senator ousted in 2012 by members of his own party in a primary batttle. The ostensible reason was that he was considered too close to President Obama and the Democrats.

Extremely comparable situations. The differences you point out involve what happened with Lieberman after he was beaten in the primary in 2006. Of course, we have no idea what Lugar will do; will he run third party? Will he endorse Obama and speak at the DNC? None of those three would surprise me in the slightest.
 
Brainster said:
I can't understand how you keep missing the point; perhaps it is intentional, because you don't want to admit that the Democrats are just as intolerant of dissent as the Republicans.
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Sorry, no matter how hard you try to push that false equivalency, it won't budge.

Lugar was a sitting senator ousted in 2012 by members of his own party in a primary batttle. The ostensible reason was that he was considered too close to President Obama and the Democrats.
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And, as I asked you in the post you quoted, how come Lugar was ousted in 2012 for being too close to Obama and the Democrats, and yet ran virtually unopposed in 2006 despite being just as close to Obama and the Democrats before the 2006 election? I mean, in 2005 Obama and Lugar were co-sponsoring bills named after the both of them and writing Washington Post opinion pieces together!

Why was that cooperation (and with the exact same people, no less) deserving of overwhelming Republican voter support in 2006, but deserving of ouster in the Republican primary in 2012?
 
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ANTPogo said:
Sorry, no matter how hard you try to push that false equivalency, it won't budge.



And, as I asked you in the post you quoted, how come Lugar was ousted in 2012 for being too close to Obama and the Democrats, and yet ran virtually unopposed in 2006 despite being just as close to Obama and the Democrats before the 2006 election? I mean, in 2005 Obama and Lugar were co-sponsoring bills named after the both of them and writing Washington Post opinion pieces together!

Why was that cooperation (and with the exact same people, no less) deserving of overwhelming Republican voter support in 2006, but deserving of ouster in the Republican primary in 2012?
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Thank you for highlighting yet another similarity between Lieberman 2006 and Lugar 2012. Working with the other party is hazardous to one's political health when the other party is in power in the White House.
 
Brainster said:
Oh, I agree. Lugar's apostasy came before he was expelled from the party in a primary vote. Lieberman's came after.
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Lieberman was not expelled from his party. This is ground we've trod already so there should be no need for another correction.
 
Brainster said:
I can't understand how you keep missing the point; perhaps it is intentional, because you don't want to admit that the Democrats are just as intolerant of dissent as the Republicans.

Lieberman was a sitting senator ousted in 2006 by members of his own party in a primary battle. The ostensible reason was that he was considered too close to President Bush and the Republicans.

Lugar was a sitting senator ousted in 2012 by members of his own party in a primary batttle. The ostensible reason was that he was considered too close to President Obama and the Democrats.

Extremely comparable situations. The differences you point out involve what happened with Lieberman after he was beaten in the primary in 2006. Of course, we have no idea what Lugar will do; will he run third party? Will he endorse Obama and speak at the DNC? None of those three would surprise me in the slightest.
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When I voted here in Ct. the primary fight was over his support for the war. Not support of Bush.
 
ANTPogo said:
Why was that cooperation (and with the exact same people, no less) deserving of overwhelming Republican voter support in 2006, but deserving of ouster in the Republican primary in 2012?
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We are living in a post 1/20/2009 world.

Daredelvis
 
BenBurch said:
I'm sending off a donation today, in fact. We absolutely can pick up that seat.
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I just donated $100 and encouraged my FB friends to do likewise. Anyone interested in donating to or supporting Democratic candidate Joe Donnelly for the U.S. Senate seat in IN can visit his website here.
 
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Mourdock trying his best to pivot:

Local and national tea party groups embraced him, but Mourdock, mindful that his task didn’t end with his GOP primary win, has taken pains to avoid being branded a tea party creation.

“It’s hard to label me … as the tea party candidate,” Mourdock said as recently as Monday.

When a man walked into Mourdock’s election night party dressed in a colonial outfit, his grass-roots organizing director asked him to change into a campaign T-shirt.

“This is not about the tea party tonight,” Mourdock aide Diane Hubbard firmly told the man. “This is about Richard.”
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Puppycow said:
Well, I haven't looked into it very closely yet, but I heard that Joe Donnelly is a conservative pro-life Democrat, the sort who might have a decent chance.
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So...everyone's shifting further to the right in response to voters?


Where's the hate-filled vitriol over this Democrat here? :confused:


:rolleyes:
 
Beerina said:
So...everyone's shifting further to the right in response to voters?
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A single Indiana Democrat is "everyone"?

Where's the hate-filled vitriol over this Democrat here? :confused:
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I know, right? I mean, it's almost eerily like Brainster is wrong about the Democrats expelling anyone who's too conservative and doesn't toe the party line.

:rolleyes:
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Oh, good. You saved me the trouble of having to post this smiley in my reply to your post.
 
BenBurch said:
I'm sending off a donation today, in fact. We absolutely can pick up that seat.
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I live in Indiana. I think Mourdock will win, and it won't be all that close. Closer than Lugar would have been probably (Lugar would have won in a landslide as he always has), but still not that close.

-Bri
 
I often hear the complaint that US politics suffers from being an effectively two-party system. European parliamentary systems are often the basis of comparison for this claim. One of the frequent responses to this complaint is that although we only have two major parties, elections involve more than two candidates if you include the primary process. The difficulty with this argument, though, is that the primary process seems to be broken. Incumbents almost never lose primary battles, let alone general elections (where they have >90% success rate). The entrenchment of incumbent politicians in both parties is a serious problem, and is a major contributor to all sorts of political pathologies which have developed.

So now we have a very rare example where this entrenchment has been broken. And people think that's a bad thing? Because I don't. Breaking the lock that incumbents have on their seats is far more important than the particular candidates at play here.
 
Ziggurat said:
Breaking the lock that incumbents have on their seats is far more important than the particular candidates at play here.
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This one election breaks the incumbent lock? Hardly. If you're looking for that kind of evidence I'd suggest the 2010 House elections. Both in the primaries and final elections, scores of incumbents got the boot. The Senate also had some turnover that year. Even the election of Scott Brown, although Teddy was on the wrong side of the grass was seen as an outsider against the Mass. Dem. machine.
 
SezMe said:
This one election breaks the incumbent lock? Hardly.
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That's not really what I meant. Rather, my point is that its significance in terms of demonstrating that it is possible (because people tend not to try to do things that they think are impossible) is larger than the significance of who exactly got elected.

If you're looking for that kind of evidence I'd suggest the 2010 House elections. Both in the primaries and final elections, scores of incumbents got the boot.
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No, very few people got booted in the primaries. It was big news in cases where that happened. And the Senate is more entrenched than the House, so the fact that this happened to a Senator is a bigger deal.

Even the election of Scott Brown, although Teddy was on the wrong side of the grass was seen as an outsider against the Mass. Dem. machine.
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But he wasn't running against an incumbent. And that matters, a lot.
 
MattusMaximus said:
I fear that until the Tea Party/GOP gets its collective ass handed to them in a big election that this is the "new normal" for the Republican party.
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But this supposes that the Tea Party wing of the GOP will go gently into that good night in the event of such an election defeat. I suspect the opposite outcome, that it would instead rage against the dying of the light. It would conclude that it must try even harder to get its message across and become even more strident and partisan.
 
The problem with Lugar is he represented the Republican/CFR establishment and not Indiana.
 
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