Snowe is retiring, so she won’t be running in any primary. Ex-governor / political rock star, Angus King (I) is running for her seat. There was a Democrat, Rep. Pingree, who said she would run, but when King threw his hat in the ring, she decided to stay put in the House.
Collins? Who knows? She’s been pretty safe as Olympia Jr. for the past several election cycles.
But, I should point out, Maine is a lot more red (especially around the neck area) than a lot of people know. Portland is pretty much the only bastion of liberalism - and while the metro area essentially represents have the population of the state - the other half of the state still churns their own butter and fucks their sisters, so it’s kind of a crap-shoot either way.
Lugar can’t run as an independent this year. In Indiana once you’ve participated in a party primary you’re stuck with that primary’s decision. Lugar’ll retire.
I think Lugar’s death knell sounded when he spoke out against the Republicans blocking the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, not with the banking industry. The Republican party was opposed to START 2 because Obama brokered it. Lugar pointed out that it increased inspections of nuclear stockpiles in Russia and saw the destruction of many nuclear weapons. It was idiotic to oppose it no matter who brokered the deal since it was a massive win not only for US/Russia relations but everyone who didn’t want a nuclear holocaust. He had to know as soon as he spoke the RINO police would be all over him next election.
CHUCK TODD: You have said that there needs to be more partisanship in Washington. How do you square that with being a legislator?
RICHARD MOURDOCK: Well, what I’ve said is that I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. […] Bipartisanship means they have to come our way […] To me, the highlight of politics, frankly, is to inflict my opinion on someone else with a microphone or in front of a camera. […]
It’s funny and snarky when Democratic pundits say that’s what Republicans mean by “bipartisan”. Not so much when actual Republicans say that’s what Republicans mean by “bipartisan”.
Is he supposed to just come out and say it like that? I thought that was double-secret Republican political strategy…
Re: climate change, denial is the official line of the State of Indiana under Governor Mitch Daniels (R) - once you hear it from the Commissioner of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, it almost doesn’t even register when the State Treasurer / Republican nominee for US Senate says it.
For the record, I am a Democrat in Indiana who has voted for Lugar in the past, and voted in the Republican primary yesterday specifically to vote for him again. He did a heck of a lot of work to do what was right for the nation, not just for his party. I’m very sad that compromise for the good of the country as a whole is apparently evil.
Meh. For all this blather, much of it from him, about being a reasonable moderate, sane and able to work with the other party, Lugar was just as reliable a filibuster vote as anyone else in the caucus. He had changed along with the party to whom he still owes his highest loyalty, not his country. It may have been true in the pre-Gingrichization years, but it hadn’t been anymore.
There is now a real chance for a progressive vote from that seat. This is a good thing for the country, despite immediate appearances.
It’s going to be awfully lonely once you’ve driven everyone out of the party I once voted for.
As I said elsewhere, Politics is Compromise. When you refuse to compromise and refuse to accept anything less than your own demands, demands that you know are not acceptable to the majority (or worse, convince yourself that the majority actually want despite the evidence), you marginalize yourself and lose all power.
Sooner or later, the people who still have some shred of sanity and some sense of wanting to get things done, or are TPINO’s are going to start bailing on you, because they’re going to see that the Tea Party is all rage and impotence.
Then maybe the Republicans will stop being the Party of the Ignorant and the Insane and return to principles I want to vote for.
True. And Lugar wasn’t moderate at all, except in foreign policy where he would be better characterized as “Serious and informed”.
If the GOP wasn’t so embedded in deep crazy, the banksters couldn’t topple him. As always monied interests and the loons have a symbiotic relationship within the Republican Party: strength in the latter aids the former.
Remember that Northwestern Indiana shares a border with Illinois and is part of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. That may help account for some of the Obama support in 2008. I don’t remember McCain really fighting hard in Indiana in 2008 either.
When Lugar went into the Senate he was seen as a rock-ribbed conservative. He and guys like Jake Garn and Orrin Hatch were seen as conservative as they get. Now Lugar and Hatch are being run out of their own party.
Remember all those party-line votes we’ve had over the past few years? Yeah, Lugar voted the party line along with everyone else.
Hell, we’ve just recently had a numberofvotes on the Senate floor where there were a number of GOP defectors - but Lugar wasn’t among them.
Lugar would talk sanely enough to impress the centrist pundits. But he didn’t vote much different from the wingnuts.
Quite frankly, I’d rather have a GOP Senator who is clearly a nutcase than one who has people convinced of his sanity and occasional moderation, but who votes with the wingnuts 99% of the time.
I’d be all for having actual reasonable Republicans, but what we have instead is pretend ones who vote like wingnuts. And since that’s the case, I’d rather have actual wingnuts, because they aren’t trying to fool anyone.
I used to really like Dick Lugar. I wanted him to win the Presidency in 1996. But he never stood up to the hardline sectarian tax slasher faction (or “GOP leadership”), certainly not after Obama became President (which is weird, because he and Obama were supposedly friends) so I just gave up on him.
Sucks to be a milquetoast, yes? Maybe if he’d showed some spine he’d have kept his seat.
In some respects, right now is the WWII of the Culture Wars. WWII was the last gasp of European rivalry, Millenia of nations fighting, trying to grab up other, less developed parts of the world just to be seen as bigger powers among each other, etc. When it ended, European rivalries were exhausted and they became pawns of larger powers. Now for the most part, even that is over.
In 50 years, we’ve lost a lot of baggage. Women, Native Americans, Gays, Blacks all have made major strides towards true equality. We professed our intent to treat all as equals, to honor all beliefs, to support those who need it, to level the playing field for everyone. The far right is on the losing side in that culture war, and they’re making one last, desperate push to turn back the tide of History. To go back to when Women, Native Americans and Blacks were inferior citizens and “knew their place”. When we didn’t have to respect all them strange and stupid foreign religions and wierdo cults. In some respects to a idealized (and never existed) age when government stayed out of everyone’s business and everything JUST WORKED.
I think part of it isn’t ideological. Lugar pissed people off with his house. And he ran kind of a crappy campaign. He focused more on his national record than on Indiana and the things that mattered to Indianans. Plus, the man is 80. I think there were a lot of people who just thought he was too old.