Analysis: The overreaction to Sen. Richard Lugar's primary defeat

Analysis: The overreaction to Sen. Richard Lugar's primary defeat

WASHINGTON -- Much is being said and written about Richard Lugar's (utterly predictable) defeat in Indiana's Republican Senate primary, most of it giving credit to the tea party movement, which backed winner Richard Mourdock.

The upstart movement certainly deserves some credit as does, most especially, its finance arm, which poured millions of dollars into the anti-Lugar campaign. (Ironists and insurgents take note: Those funders are as much a part of the Washington establishment as the hated members of both political parties.)

It didn't help, of course, that Lugar committed such heresies -- for a Republican -- as supporting  citizenship for some illegal immigrants and voting to confirm President Obama's Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

But the insta-analysis  overlooks something more fundamental and timeless: Lugar was defeated because he lost touch with the voters of his home state.

Case in point: He hadn't lived there for years, having sold his Indianapolis home in 1977 to reside in the Washington suburbs. After a legal fight this year, Lugar switched his residency to the family farm in Marion County. But the damage, as is said, was done. (A picture of the 36-year lawmaker and international affairs expert piloting a tractor through furrowed fields was not exactly the first thing that came to voters' minds.)

Simply put, Lugar -- who knew he was highly vulnerable -- ran a terrible campaign, awakening too late to the political threat he faced.

Others, similarly situated, have prevailed. Sen. John McCain faced a tea party challenger, J.D. Hayworth, at perhaps the height of the movement and easily fended off the threat to win reelection in 2010.

In Utah, Sen. Orrin Hatch -- another veteran of the Senate class of '76 -- faced a tea party challenge earlier this year. Unlike Lugar, Hatch mounted an aggressive, carefully plotted reelection effort. (He witnessed firsthand the potency of the tea party movement, which knocked off Utah's veteran senator, Robert Bennett, at the state party convention in May 2010.)

Hatch hired one of Utah's sharpest political operatives, former state GOP Chairman Dave Hansen, to lead his campaign. He moved dramatically rightward, to cover that flank. And, perhaps most importantly, he began the arduous and humbling work of reaching out to the individual delegates who pick the party's nominee at a state convention under Utah's unusual process.

The result: Last month Hatch, 78, came up just shy of winning the nomination  and now is the favorite to prevail in a June runoff with former state Sen. Dan Liljenquist and win a seventh -- and, Hatch promises, final -- Senate term in Nove mber.

Lugar is a good and decent man, with a long record of honorable, bipartisan service. The tea party is still a political movement to be reckoned with, especially in a Republican primary, where it can wield considerable clout.

But Lugar gets all of the blame and the tea party only a share of the credit for the result Tuesday in Indiana.

Anything else is overreading the tea leaves.

mark.barabak@latimes.com

Original source: The overreaction to Sen. Richard Lugar's primary defeat