Tea Party candidate defeats Dick Lugar

You said more cock LOL!

 

You've got kock on the brain--that's not what Bob wrote. And, fwiw, neither spelling is his real name, nor do I believe it was a typo. Give it a moment's thought.

 

No, Bob Cock just got it wrong.

 

As an Indiana resident with no particular party affiliation, the result certainly didn't shock me. Will also admit, I sat out the primary (wouldn't dream of skipping the general).

Just from talking and listening to folks, there seemed to be two major "issues" with Lugar. First, there just seemed to be an overwhelming sense of "it's time." Even folks who've been pleased with his performance, just didn't want to send an 80 year old Lugar back to the Senate. The second part, is how poorly his campaign was run. Or, maybe I should say, his lack of campaign. Lugar seemed to be happy to just sit back & rely on his name. Didn't work.

Having said that, I feel like Mourdock is going to have big trouble, once the bright lights of the general campaign get focused on what's actually rolling around in his brain. Donnelly (who's my district's congressman) seems to be the kind of Democrat that independent / centrist voters like myself will be able to get comfortable with, when it comes time to make a final decision. I've voted Lugar since moving to Indiana a couple of decades ago. My vote will almost certainly go to the Democratic side of the ledger this time around.

 

Didn't Lugar routinely get 70 percent of the vote?

He had to have plenty of Democrats voting for him, even in Indiana.

 

That begs the question as to why they don't have term limits. If a president can be limited to two terms, it seems something should be appropriate for legislators, governors, etc.

The state where I currently live has had the same governor for 12 years now and he is considering running again in 2014. I don't know all the laws here (just moved here 4 months ago in the midst of a family crisis), but that strikes me as illogical and wrong to have the same man in the same office for that long.

 

Not crazy.

 

Nobody ever ran against him, at least not recently. In Indiana, he almost felt like an independent candidate non-beholden to either party. Which, of course, Mourdock exploited, to his credit.

 

This argument comes up a lot, and it comes up as an antidote to combat Citizens United, because a lot of people think that the decision will help keep incumbents entrenched because of their resource advantage.

My counter is that there is a lot of value to institutional knowledge and know-how for legislators, even more value than there is for the executive branch. Judges have the longest tenure. Then legislators the second-longest, theoretically (need to be voted in). The executive has the shortest.

Seems right to me.

 

Exactly. Which certainly helps explain why he didn't seem to know how to campaign when he found himself in a hotly contested election for the first time in three decades at the age of 80.

And he'd still easily beat Mourdock in a general election. It was the right wing of his own party that turned on him far more than the left. There are plenty of Indiana moderates and dems who'd still vote for Lugar but never fucking consider it for Mourdock.

 

So why can Lugar not run as an independent in the general election then? Is there some requirement that every candidate be affiliated with a party?

 

IC 3-8-1-5.5
Candidates defeated in primary or nomination process; ineligibility
Sec. 5.5. (a) Except as provided in IC 3-13-1-19 and IC 3-13-2-10 for filling a vacancy on a ticket, a person who:
(1) is defeated in a primary election;