Lugar is trying to demonstrate that he remains connected to Hoosiers’ concerns. Grandfather of Ind. GOP fights for seat

CONNERSVILLE, Ind. — Sen. Dick Lugar’s glaring weakness and his enduring strength are one and the same: He’s the grandfather of the Indiana Republican Party.

Nearing 80, Lugar is facing his first serious challenge in decades — a two-step in which he has to fend off conservative state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in the May 8 primary followed by Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly in November if he hopes to win an Indiana-record seventh term. The charge from both camps: Lugar’s a nice man who lost touch with his Hoosier roots somewhere inside the Washington Beltway.


If the setup sounds familiar, that’s because this race is an epilogue to a 2010 election in which anti-establishment Republicans knocked off sitting senators and party favorites, and in several cases gave Democrats a shot to win seats that had seemed out of reach.

The Indiana GOP primary will be a test not only of Lugar’s standing with fellow Hoosiers, but more broadly, of whether tea party fervor in Republican ranks has sustained or subsided in the past two years. If Lugar survives, his campaign will become the playbook for incumbents anxious to avoid the folly of fallen colleagues who never saw the tea party train coming. The rough sketch: Lock up all the money in the state early, shift to the right, wage a modern campaign and hit your opponent before he can define himself.

There’s plenty of ammunition for Mourdock to make the case that Lugar has drifted away from conservative orthodoxy, starting with Lugar’s votes for President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court appointments, his one-time co-sponsorship of the DREAM act, which would pave the way for undocumented aliens brought to this country as minors to become citizens, and earmarks. On top of that, Lugar backed the bank bailouts and an auto industry rescue plan that, while vital to the state’s economy, isn’t popular with a large swath of conservatives.

“Clearly, over the years he’s become more of a Big Government Republican,” Mourdock said of Lugar during an interview at a hotel across from the Indianapolis statehouse. “When you’ve been involved in it for 36 years, you are it, it is you, it becomes the answer. Of course it’s the answer, because you’ve put your whole life in it. I don’t see government as the answer to our problems.”

But Mourdock knows he has to approach the task of attacking the iconic Lugar gingerly, and he worries that he could lose control of his message if the Washington-based groups backing his campaign — the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks, in particular — don’t treat Lugar with the reverence voters here universally say he has earned.

“One of the concerns I have is that those groups that aren’t in Indiana don’t recognize … that he’s seen as this sort of grandfatherly image. They could run commercials that, if they run them in the wrong way, I fear could build sympathy for Mr. Lugar,” he said.

It’s an ironic twist for a candidate running against a “Washington insider”: Lugar’s dominance of state fundraising networks has forced Mourdock to look outside the state for contributions to his campaign and ultimately to rely on Washington’s new incumbent-takedown industry to come to the rescue.

Mourdock says he’ll have enough money to compete, but he finished the year with a war chest less than one-tenth the size of Lugar’s.

Lugar gets the threat. And unlike some of the 2010 Republicans who were knocked off by upstart tea partiers, Lugar has had plenty of time to prepare for a challenge from the right.

Through December, he had socked away $4 million, a war chest that’s now being spent to define the race. Lugar fired his longtime pollster, put out an internal survey that showed him up 55 percent to 30 percent, and has volunteers making hundreds of thousands of calls across the state to gauge voters’ concerns and push his message. Lugar has also shifted his voting patterns to be more in line with the party in recent months, a trend noted by The New York Times on Sunday.

He went on the air last week with an ad hammering Mourdock for not attending meetings of state boards on which he sits as Indiana’s treasurer, for offering an unrealistic budget plan and, without a hint of irony, for slinging mud. Mourdock says that, like Gov. Mitch Daniels, he often sends a designee to meetings of the state police pension board and similar panels.

He and Donnelly contend that the negative ad, which started airing 11 weeks before the primary, is a sign of the state of the race.

“Richard Lugar is in the fight of his life,” Donnelly said. “The fact that he just started negative ads is an indicator that it’s a coin flip,” he added, displaying, perhaps, more wishful thinking than raw political analysis.

“I’m always concerned about any campaign,” Lugar said last Thursday in a tiny anteroom so far removed from the ornate trappings of the U.S. Capitol that plastic-wrapped tablecloths were stacked a few feet away.

“We’ve gone to school, I think, on new methods of campaigning,” he said, before delivering a speech to the Connersville/Fayette County Chamber of Commerce in a community center’s indoor basketball court here. “Microtargeting people” working for him have “identified in this case what they believe is the Republican constituency” and “have in mind a pretty good idea of how many voters will vote and who they are by age, by geography, by interest.”

Those who know Lugar well say that behind the permanent smile and kindly blue eyes lurks a fierce competitor — one who, according to some accounts, is willing to dispatch allies to kneecap folks who get in his way.

David Willkie, the campaign’s political director and a grandson of 1940 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, does nothing to dispel the impression that Lugar is tougher than his statesman’s manner would suggest.

“Dick Lugar’s a perfect gentleman, but he’s also a fighter, and we will fight to win,” Willkie said. “We’ve always responded to challenges of our opponents.”

Outside groups have focused on Indiana because there aren’t many opportunities to knock off a sitting Republican senator in a primary this year. In part, that’s a matter of simple math: The GOP is defending just 10 Senate seats, compared with 18 in 2010. But it’s also a sign that tea party members, particularly officeholders, are better integrated in the fabric of the Republican Party and that national GOP officials have been more delicate in their handling of tea party challenges to establishment candidates.

At the national level, Democratic and Republican operatives say a light blip on the edge of the political radar will grow in intensity if Mourdock manages to knock off Lugar.

Donnelly survived the Republican sweep of Indiana in 2010, and he can stake a claim to some distance from Obama on social issues, the 2009 effort to institute a cap-and-trade system for polluters, and the Keystone XL pipeline. He’s hitting Lugar for his support of Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into a system in which seniors are given subsidies to buy private insurance — a position that helps Lugar in the primary but could turn off Democrats and independents in the general election.

Like many Democrats who won in swing states and districts in 2008, Donnelly will need Obama’s help in boosting turnout among African-American voters to have a shot at victory, and he acknowledges that he wants the president to run a robust campaign in Indiana — though veteran Democratic strategists suggest he’s unlikely to pour resources into the state the way he did in 2008.

“I want the president to come to our state and to campaign in our state,” Donnelly said. But he stopped short of saying that he would appear with Obama: “It all depends on where I am that day.”

For now, he’s got an unlikely and unofficial ally in Mourdock.

They are echoing each other’s lines of attack on Lugar. The latest was an embarrassing but unsuccessful challenge to his residency — and legitimacy on the ballot — based on the fact that Lugar’s lived in the tony Washington suburb of McLean, Va., since 1977 and has spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars at Indiana hotels over the years when he’s come back to visit.

Mike O’Brien, the Hendricks County GOP chairman and a Lugar supporter, said the issue is “not helpful” to the senator.

But he contends that Mourdock miscalculated by assuming the tea party spark that forged a new Republican brand in 2010 would remain ignited.

“The iron was hot,” said O’Brien, who was once a senior aide to Gov. Mitch Daniels. “It’s just cooled off.”

The truth is that Lugar hasn’t had a tough race since 1974, when, as the second-term mayor of Indianapolis, he lost a competitive challenge to Sen. Birch Bayh. Two years later, he beat Democratic Sen. Vance Hartke with 59 percent of the vote and has had to run hard only one other time: in 1982, when he won by 8 percentage points in a bad year for Republicans.

He is showing signs of his age, including a pronounced stoop on the stump, though he retains the acuity of the Rhodes scholar whose expertise on political matters ranges from the intricacies of farm policy to urban planning and nuclear nonproliferation.

It’s hard not to see Lugar as a creature of Washington and international capitals beyond. As he travels across Indiana, he wears a presidential-seal tie clip engraved with George Bush’s signature — “the first one,” he clarifies — and his frequent references to Russia and its nuclear stockpile have a mid-1980s “Red Dawn” feel, even though he’s talking about current reports from the Pentagon about the state of the disarmament he crafted with Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn after the fall of the Soviet Union.

He’s now trying to demonstrate he remains connected to Hoosiers’ concerns.

He freely cites the polls and phone banks to explain that Indiana Republican voters care about jobs and the deficit to the exclusion of almost every other issue — a conclusion that anyone with a working set of ears could reach within 10 minutes of being on the ground here. And while he knows those are the issues he must discuss on the campaign trail, he is perhaps too reluctant to shy away from talk of his focus on foreign affairs.

“We’re talking to the issues in which the 30- and 40-year-olds are interested, both on the jobs as well as the deficit or overspending or so forth. Interestingly enough, that’s their issue also,” he said when asked why someone half his age should vote to give him a seventh term. “But I think a principal reason for electing me would be the continuity in terms of world affairs, the leadership that we will continue to give with regard to the foreign policy of the county and the security policy of the country.”

But Lugar has to find a way to weave what he spends most of his time on — his work as the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee — into those issues of jobs and debt. In his stump speech, the basic outline is this: Americans’ wallets are threatened by international and domestic oil politics — the potential for hostilities in the Middle East and the president’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline project, in particular.

That helps explain why Lugar was so quick to jump into the Keystone battle, which touches on employment, domestic oil supply and the anti-environmentalist strain in the GOP. The issue also gives Lugar distance from Obama, who used him as an example of a Republican he could work with during the 2008 presidential campaign.

While he won an important victory last week when the Indiana attorney general ruled that he remains a resident of the state, the attention on the question of his whereabouts feeds his rivals’ assertion that he hascrossed the line from Hoosier to Washingtonian.

But there are signs of his presence everywhere in the state.

Just before he spoke to the Chamber here, Connersville’s mayor asked Lugar to sign a picture of himself on the front page of the local newspaper. It was dated July 10, 1978.

In early April, at a debate with Mourdock, Indiana Republicans will get to see for themselves whether Lugar is a relic or a reservoir of needed wisdom in a time of economic crisis and international tumult.

Former Rep. Mark Souder, who now serves as a political analyst in the state, said that for all the talk that Lugar’s grip on Hoosier politics is slipping, his ties to the state’s power bases remain deep and strong and that’s what will matter most May 8.

“Sen. Lugar has many extended and influential networks of former staffers and campaign allies, as well as decades of graduates from programs such as the Lugar Series for women interested in politics,” Souder wrote in an email exchange. “They assist each other in campaigns, business ventures and community projects across the state. This Lugar network has helped modernize Indiana, was the backbone of Mitch Daniels’s winning election (he is also a Lugar alumnus) and is the most powerful influence in the state of Indiana.”