Well, by golly, if George Will says it's a mystery why conservatives are mad at Richard Lugar, then it must be so:
It is not clear why. Congressional Quarterly, assessing 760 votes over the eight Reagan years, said Lugar supported the president 88 percent of the time — more than any other senator. Yes, Lugar voted for Barack Obama's two Supreme Court nominees, but there is a conservative case to be made (conservatives make it when they have the presidency) for deference as the default position regarding presidents' judicial choices. Yes, Lugar voted for the New START treaty, but all living Republican ex-secretaries of state supported it, including George Shultz, who served Ronald Reagan. Shultz has endorsed Lugar (“Reagan relied on him”).
Will does admit, sort of grudgingly, I thought, that the "political center of the nation and GOP has moved rightward" since Lugar became a senator in 1977, to the point where the American Conservative Union ranked him the fifth most liberal Republican senator and the National Journal ranked him the fourth.
ugar's courtliness and Midwestern aversion to rhetorical flamboyance do not match this moment of fevered politics. So this race will take the temperature of a fundamentally temperate state that Obama carried in 2008 by a wafer-thin margin (28,391 votes).
Wow. "Fundamentally temperate." Who knew? Guess I should wipe my fevered brow and go lie down for a while.
Comments
This illustrates the problem with trying to analyze things through the partisan lens alone. Some will say that Lugar's support of Obama's START treaty is evidence of his liberalism. Others could easily argue that Lugar's ability to persuade Obama to this decision is evidence of his leadership.
I'll bet a lot of the D's that voted for this would have voted against if an R president supported it, and I'll bet a lot of the R's who opposed it would have supported it if it had been proposed by an R president. Eaisly leading one to conclude that many R's are mad at Lugar not because he supported this treaty, but simply because he did so with a D president.