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Posted on 05/08/2012 5:29:23 PM PDT by Steelfish
Tea Party Upstart Mourdock Defeats Longtime Indiana Sen. Lugar
By Kim Geiger May 8, 2012 Richard Mourdock has defeated longtime Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana in the Republican primary, according to an Associated Press projection, ending the career of one of the Senate’s most pragmatic politicians and casting a cloud over GOP efforts to win control of the chamber.
Mourdock, state treasurer in Indiana, campaigned as a conservative alternative to Lugar. He became a darling of the tea party movement after he began a legal challenge to the terms of the Obama administration’s bailout of Chrysler.
Mourdock was endorsed by Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann, and Lugar had the backing of the party establishment, including Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Mourdock will face Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly, a three-term congressman from the South Bend area, this fall. The matchup is the preferred outcome for Democrats, who view Lugar’s ouster as an opportunity to pick up a longtime Republican seat.
"Richard Mourdock is this year's Ken Buck," said Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Executive Director Guy Cecil. Buck was a tea-party-backed Republican who upset the establishment favorite in the GOP primary in Colorado in 2010, only to lose in November. "Tonight's results make the Indiana Senate race a toss-up."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
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Nice to see the Tea Party hitting their stride again after failing to coalesce around a viable conservative presidential candidate. The only way Romney would have been defeated is if a concensus conservative candidate had been identified early in the process and was able to attract the funds necessary to take on the GOP-e’s favoured son. Unfortunately, all of the conservative crop this year were flawed. Cain would have won if the harassment issue hadn’t kneecapped him. Perry would have won if he hadn’t shot himself in the foot with the immigration issue (and proven to be so weak in the debates). Santorum would have won if he had shown some fire in his belly earlier in the campaign, instead of being every conservative’s second choice. Gingrich would have won if his conservative message hadn’t been mixed with bizarre attacks on Paul Ryan’s budget and his mixed messages on immigration. Michelle Bachmann is the only one I don’t think had a legitimate shot, as the media’s misogynistic attacks on conservative women (hello Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle).
I think the success at the State nomination level and failure on the national level, says more about the increased scrutiny candidates get at the national level and how difficult it is to find a candidate who is a combination of charisma, experience, good character, consistency in their conservative values. At the state level the charisma issue is much less important and candidates don’t have to deal with as many issues as a presidential candidate. The Tea Party will have learned a valuable lesson from 2012 and can now focus on repeating its 2010 success in the Senate and House races.
Maybe. We did it with Bennett, I hope we can with Hatch, too.
Liberals do not want liberty for anyone. They would rather dictate what we do, what we buy, where we go and when, and what we can do while there. Please donate. The Republic you save may be your own. |
The abortion issue is just one of many covered under the rubric of "social conservatism" ~ the right of free speech, assembly, the press, to own property without the government selling it to richer people without our permission, to be tried in court (and not in an EPA office), and so on ~ these are all big name social conservative issues.
The TEA Party has several factions. Some but not all of them are anti-social Conservatism.
This is idiotic garbage. Nobody considers "the right of free speech, assembly, the press, to own property without the government selling it to richer people without our permission, to be tried in court (and not in an EPA office), and so on" to be social issues. Nobody. And no tea party group opposes any of this. You post crazy stupid nonsense.
Just like to say, we were here first while you guys were screwing around with the Democrats, or the equally dredful "moderate republicans".
This makes no sense at all. Who are you talking to and what are you trying to say?
It's long overdue for you to get with the picture and lay off the anti-social conservative stuff. We are not your enemy although you seem to think you should be ours.
Being arrogant and obnoxious is not your real problem here. Your problem is that your post makes no sense. You need to stop, take a few deep breaths, stop making wild accusations and jumping to insane conclusions, and just state your opinions directly and plainly in a way that normal people can understand.
But the MSM told me the Tea Party was “out of steam”.....
What is that faint whistling sound I am hearing that is getting louder.....?
However, is it too much to ask that people who are not social issues conservatives refrain from attacking the Judeo-Christian principles on which this country was founded, or ridiculing the faith commitments of religious believers?
You believe abortion is murder. Others do not. The problem we have with respect to abortion is not that there are differing opinions regarding it. The problem we have is Roe v. Wade, which was nine justices deciding for everyone that abortion must be legal everywhere regardless of what the people think or the founders intended.
The solution to judicial activism is the Constitution, not the Bible.
If we can organize a strong majority of Americans behind the principle of fidelity to the Constitution as ratified, then specific social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, etc. can be resolved through the legislative process at the state level as the Constitution intends.
A TEA Party affiliation and structure is actually QUITE RECENT. Social Conservatives have been fighting all the battles for decades ~ you’all started with a TV show. I remember watching the guy melt down.
“This is GREAT news — but you do realize, of course, that the Republican Establishment will do everything in their power to make sure this seat goes Democrat. They did that in 2010 and in races before that.”
The irony of this fact is that when Conservatives talk about doing the SAME THING in response to being handed Romney as a candidate, Conservatives are traitors. Try starting a thread that talks about NOT VOTING for Romney, but voting GOP down ticket and you’ll get all kinds of histrionics about how it will ‘destroy the republic’.
When establishment Republicans used dollars we donate in order to ELECT DEMOCRATS in races where Conservatives beat the Republican, well that’s just hard-ball politics.
Peggy Noonan was crying in the paper last week about keeping Lugar because he could work across the aisle.
Peggy, its not a compromise when one side does all the giving. Conservatives have been the battered wife in its relationship with the GOP, and with Democrats, for the last 30 years. At one point, if you are the abuser, you are going to wake up with the abused stratling your body and pointing a gun in your face.
It’s funny, being shot at that range is a relatively quiet experience. You are dead before your ears can send the information to your brain. When the shot came for Lugar, he’d been redistricted, he may or may not have still had a house in Indiana, and he actually forgot how to run in a primary. He had so taken his Dukedom for granted that he never even bothered with the pleasantries any more.
It was a good scam for both Lugar and Hatch while it lasted. When you are in for 35 years, you aren’t serving anybody but yourself at that point. He’ll take that fat-ass pension and his platinum-plated medical plan with him into his 90’s, I would think. Peggy’s going to shake her head and cry a little.
The 80’s are over, Peggy. Wake up and look at what we are passing on to our kids and tell me a 35 year veteran of the Senate shouldn’t answer for some of it?
Thanks for your very interesting posts re: Mourdock vs Donnelly in the November election. Encouraging information!
You can pretty well bet Lugar will vote with the Democrats in the Senate, that is if they ever take a vote, for the time he has left in the Senate.
You have absolutely no idea of what you speak (or write) with respect to Libertarians. Without voters who are generally ideologically libertarian, the Republican Party would be nearly indistinguishable from the Democrats and have no chance of winning any national election.
I am borrowing your post:) you are right on
Pure genius. Deserves a repost!
Take it. It’s yours.
You sure got that wrong.
Thanks:) I posted it on facebook to a Noonan fan
Because you missed the point you addressed the concerns of voters.
Let me put it this way ~ same answer I give the gays. The public disapproves of gays running as Republicans so they vote against the whole ticket when that happens (SEE: 2006). The Republican public disapproves of Libertarians running as Reublicans, so they just don't vote for you ~ which may explain why there are so few of them running as Republicans ~ word does get around.
However, like gays their votes are welcome and so are their campaign donations. So, keep it up guys. You can trust us (if not those other guys).
Give til it hurts and vote early and often!
“If we can organize a strong majority of Americans behind the principle of fidelity to the Constitution as ratified, then specific social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, etc. can be resolved through the legislative process at the state level as the Constitution intends.”
I agree with that. And that is one big contribution the tea party has made to the entire conservative movement—a focus on the Constitution, enumerated powers, and the separation of powers between the Federal and State government. Only fools could study the Constitution and believe that the federal government has any role in abortion, education, health care, homosexual rights, marijuana use and many other issues. The states had and have the ‘police power’ to handle, or not handle, those issues on a governmental level.
I’m very comfortable in the tea party and social conservative evangelical wings of the party. In fact, most tea partiers I know (and I know a lot) are both. And both wings of the coalition should be comfortable opposing a leviathan federal government bent on spending us into bankruptcy and imposing the morality of left-wing elitists as a uniform national morality on all of the states and the people thereof. Even the most libertarian of our colleagues should understand that there is a huge difference between having the federal government impose a nationwide abortion law (Roe) and a nationwide sodomy law (Lawrence) and to use federal taxpayer dollars to subsidize abortion, on the one hand, and having a state make abortions legal, on the other hand.
Interesting statistic from Tuesday.
In Indiana:
Richard Mourdock 403,268 60.6%
Richard Lugar 262,388 39.4
In West Virginia:
BARACK OBAMA 76,510 57.27%
KEITH JUDD 57,081 42.73%
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/08/keith-judd-texas-inmate-g_n_1501761.html
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