Once Every 36 Years, Primary Fight for Indiana Senator (Lugar)
At age 80, Richard G. Lugar, one of the longest-serving members of the United States Senate, is getting a crash course in what a campaign looks like.
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Mr. Lugar, who has not had a primary challenger since he first won election in 1976 and last contended with a race where the margin was close in 1982, is locked in a Republican primary fight for the seat he has held for six terms with the May 8 election fast approaching. A poll conducted late last month, the Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll, showed Mr. Lugar leading Richard E. Mourdock, the state’s treasurer, 42 percent to 35 percent among likely primary voters, an advantage that is within the poll’s margin of sampling error of plus or minus five points.
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To hear others tell it, Mr. Lugar, the product of a more genial era of politics, faces a confluence of opposition. Tea Party groups and organizations like the Club for Growth and the National Rifle Association are questioning his conservative credentials, some pointing to positions he has taken in favor of the bank bailout, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominees, the New Start nuclear arms control treaty, and more.
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All the while, the onslaught of ads and critiques came, denouncing Mr. Lugar as a friend of President Obama, recipient of an F-rating from the N.R.A., and someone who once opposed a ban on earmarks and supported the Dream Act.
Mr. Lugar, who dismissed claims of a closeness to President Obama, is unapologetic for working the other side of the aisle, an approach that in the 1990s brought the accomplishment for which he may be best known — a program, with Sam Nunn, a Democratic senator, for disarmament in the former Soviet Union.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/us/politics/republicans-press-richard-luger-in-primary-fight.html?pagewanted=all
PBS also did a profile of this unusual primary challenger to Lugar:
It seems that Lugar is one of the last moderate Republicans in Congress besides both US senators from Maine (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who were the only Republicans who voted for the 2009 stimulus package) and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (who beat the Tea Party-backed Joe Miller in 2010 through a write-in challenge).