Lugar's departure to leave void in Senate - South Bend Tribune [ournewsa.blogspot.com]
The second annual Town Creek Arts Festival Saturday drew scores of people looking for fine art and families looking for some fun. The event benefits the Mississippi Museum of Art's programs. There were 30 local artists and eight local restaurants ... Fine day for fine art, fun at Miss. Museum of Art's Town Creek Festival
WASHINGTON -- Republican Richard Lugar came to Washington known as "Richard Nixon's favorite mayor," voted for President Ronald Reagan's agenda more than any other senator, and is preparing to exit Congress a casualty of the anti-tax tea party.
While the political ground shifted in his 36 years in the Senate, Lugar became a foreign policy leader whose efforts to stem weapons of mass destruction earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Though he leaves office in three months, Lugar, 80, said he won't set aside the work that established his reputation. He wants to continue his career in a less public role advocating for nuclear nonproliferation and energy security.
"I'm not interested really in holding office anymore," Lugar, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its former chairman, said in an interview with Bloomberg News. "I'm not going to deny any interest ever in anything, but I really want to be sort of an independent advocate."
A former Indianapolis mayor who first won his Senate seat in 1976, Lugar and Orrin Hatch of Utah are the Senate's longest-serving Republicans. Hatch is favored to win re-election in November. Lugar was defeated in Indiana's May primary by a fellow Republican who attacked him for not actively backing the tea party's push to limit government and for being too willing to compromise with President Barack Obama.
Veterans of Washington say Lugar's Senate departure will produce a void in the chamber, leaving his party without its elder statesman on international affairs. They say it will further thin the ranks of lawmakers who seek bipartisan deals.
"He's brought to the Senate an internationalist, constructive view," said former representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana, a Democrat who once was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "He tries to solve problems not in an ideological way but in a pragmatic way."
Lugar, too, has questioned the leadership that the Republican nominee in Indiana, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, would bring to the Senate. Lugar issued a blistering statement the night of his May 8 primary loss, saying Mourdock's "embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance."
Mourdock, backed by the tea party, beat Lugar 61 percent to 39 percent.
Indiana political analyst Ed Feigenbaum said until the primary Lugar had a reputation that was "the Hoosier gold standard," and that he would have been favored in the Nov. 6 general election against the Democratic Senate nominee, U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly of Granger.
Instead, a poll conducted Sept. 19-23 of 800 likely voters by Howey Politics Indiana and DePauw University, shows a close race, with 40 percent backing Donnelly and 38 percent
favoring Mourdock. The survey's margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
"This race would not be competitive if Lugar were still in there and had not been seriously challenged in the primary," Feigenbaum said.
Lugar's focus on nuclear nonproliferation included his work with then-Sen. Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, to set up a program to help countries of the former Soviet Union dispose of weapons of mass destruction. Legislation cleared Congress two weeks before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. It has led to deactivation of 7,659 warheads and destruction of about 900 intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to Lugar's office's website.
Lugar cited the measure as his top accomplishment.
"Our country was facing annihilation," he said in the Bloomberg interview. "So was Russia, for that matter. If mistakes had been made, some miscue of that sort, whatever our foreign policy problems, now they are relatively minor in comparison to the fact that we had an existential moment, whether we knew it or not," as the Soviet Union was coming apart.
Lugar's rise in politics came after a childhood marked by some adversity. He suffered from ear infections and allergies as a child, and turned to quiet pursuits such as reading and music lessons. His studies served him well as he graduated at the top of his high school class and from Denison University in Granville, Ohio. There, he was student body co-president with Charlene Smeltzer, who became his wife.
Lugar was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and then went into politics in Indiana, winning a school board seat before his election as mayor of Indianapolis in 1968. In that post, he attracted notice for combining Indianapolis and surrounding Marion County into a single government.
He sought the Republican nomination for president in 1996 and presciently warned of the perils of terrorism. He was often on the short list of potential Republican vice presidential candidates.
In his personal life, Lugar was a serious runner, well into his 70s. For decades, he has operated a 600-acre corn, soybean and walnut farm that his father once owned in Marion County, experience he used in the Senate as chairman of the Agriculture Committee from 1995 to 2002. Lugar's passion for farming was
evident Sept. 28 when, during a visit to Bloomberg's Washington bureau, he paused in conversation to survey agriculture commodity prices that scrolled by on a screen.
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