A lot of ink has been spilled over Indiana Senator Dick Lugar’s primary loss to state treasurer Richard Mourdock on Tuesday. Those outside of Washington seem to be shocked at the upset, and some – both on the left and the right – are trying to weave a Tea Party vs. Moderate or outsider vs. insider theme into the loss.
Neither of those themes stand up to scrutiny. The true reason Lugar lost is a simple one, and the same reason many long serving members of a legislature lose a reelection fight.
He was out of touch.
Having spent most of my adult working life in politics in Washington, I am more than aware of how easy it is to get caught in a bubble, where the issue de jour becomes the focus of attention. When most of America views politics at the 30,000 foot level, our narrow focus on specific policy issues and political maneuvering makes losing touch with reality a real threat on an almost daily basis.
Lugar has had to deal with that for 36 years now, as the longest serving Republican in the Senate today. One of the old lions, he learned the ropes alongside Republicans like Barry Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, Bill Roth, Jesse Helms, Jacob Javits, and Alan Simpson. His first year in the Senate was the first year radio broadcasts of Senate proceedings were permitted, and CSPAN was almost a decade away from birth.
That’s a long time. And when your primary focus is foreign policy, as Lugar’s has been for decades, it’s easy to forget about the fundamental things in politics, like building relationships and being seen.
Lugar simply lost touch with Indiana. He didn’t live there anymore, having been a resident of McLean, Virginia for years. I was speaking to Charlie Cook over the weekend, and he related that folks in Indiana claimed Lugar had not visited some counties for over a decade and didn’t know many of the county chairmen – had never met them. And having only needed to run every six years, the pressure was rarely on for him to do so. He went to town hall meetings where voters wanted to hear about jobs and the economy and he spent an hour name dropping foreign leaders and talking about foreign policy. It was the textbook definition of having a tin ear.
Mourdock, on the other hand, has run for Congress three times (all unsuccessfully), spent almost a decade as Commissioner in Vanderburgh county, the seventh largest in Indiana, ran for Secretary of State (lost in a convention) and ran statewide for Treasurer twice, once in 2006 and once in 2010, both times successfully. He’s been campaigning for almost twenty years, with campaigns almost every two years. He was a known quantity who was doing the retail politics, knocking doors, standing in front of the supermarket and marching in parades. And while Mourdock has lost as many times as he has won, he was always working it politically.
People knew him. They didn’t know Lugar. That is the quickest and easiest way to retirement in politics, especially in today’s political environment.
Lugar lost because he lost touch. Ignore the pundits and activists who want to turn this into the latest scalp for the Tea Party Movement. It wasn’t. Mourdock could have been even more moderate than Lugar and he would still have won. The win had little to do with policy and a lot to do with a politician who had worn out his welcome but wasn’t able to admit it.
