Tea Party Makes Short Work of Dick Lugar

Did he misread the signs of the times? Probably, because otherwise Sen. Dick Lugar, one of the longest serving Republican senators, wouldn’t have put such naive hopes in his bid for renomination. On Tuesday he lost that bid — and by a decisive 20 percent margin. The political veteran lost to a Tea Party activist who succeeded in defining Lugar as a conservative moderate whose political ideas had long since become obsolete. The truth is that bipartisan cooperation has become obsolete in the U.S. Congress. The old guard of Republican realists are no longer welcome in Washington and are being forced to step down.

There are two lessons to be learned from the 80-year-old foreign policy expert’s defeat: it is definitely premature to write the Tea Party movement off as a political force and it’s no longer possible to win anything using the polite diplomatic style of a grand seigneur like Lugar.

Lugar isn’t the only Republican veteran who had to go. Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe already made her political farewell before she would have had to run again. Her reason: the poisoned American political atmosphere no longer tolerates the spirit of conservative-liberal cooperation.

Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican Senator from Texas, is another one choosing not to seek reelection. She, too, had previously risked breaking with the Republican party line on votes; she voted against blocking President Obama’s healthcare reforms.

Sen. Lugar Was the Voice of Reason for 35 years

The last Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, is one of the few remaining old-school conservative senators still serving. But McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election, was forced to take a sharp turn to the right in order to win the nomination against his Tea Party-backed challenger in the primaries.

McCain was forced to move so far right that he has since developed a credibility problem. On election day, Lugar was still defending his own bipartisan reputation and said after his Indiana defeat that he could not recall a time when the atmosphere was so politically charged.

His victorious opponent, Tea Party-supported Richard Mourdock, interpreted his win as an indication that Indiana voters wanted a more conservative Senate.

When it came to U.S. foreign policy, Lugar had been the voice of reason in important international agreements. As 2010 drew to a close, this two-time head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee threw his political weight behind the U.S.-Russian arms reduction treaty, START — a treaty that was eventually passed by Congress after much wrangling.

In addition, he supported Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court as well as his proposal to grant at least the children of illegal aliens a path by which they might become citizens. Lugar also has historical family ties to Germany, a network of excellent contacts and was a frequent visitor to the Federal Republic.

The senator, first elected in 1977, was accused of losing contact with Indiana voters. The fact that Lugar had primarily resided in Washington, D.C., for a number of years probably didn’t help him in his reelection campaign.

The Republicans Are the Problem

But just a few years ago, this sort of situation would not have been a determining factor in his reelection chances. Established senior politicians like Lugar hardly ever had to worry about reelection. Lugar’s defeat prompted McCain to drily observe that the lesson learned by the Lugar loss was never to play defense.

But the Lugar case again shows just how much the Republican Party has changed in the United States. That’s also made clear in a book coauthored by liberal Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and conservative Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

One of their conclusions in particular caused significant buzz when they wrote, “One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

But Mann and Ornstein don’t stop there. They also criticize Washington’s “political correctness” and the mainstream media’s insistence that both parties share criticism equally. The real cause of the political paralysis in Washington comes mainly from one side only: the Republican Party.

Obama has lost one of the few remaining Republicans with whom he was able to work. In a statement following Lugar’s electoral defeat, the president described Lugar as being often willing “to reach across the aisle and get things done.”

But Obama’s remark can also be taken by the Tea Party movement as proof that the new tactics were right on the money.