Richard Lugar’s name won’t be on the Indiana election ballot this fall, but he’s still serving his state, wrapping up a distinguished, 36-year tenure in the U.S. Senate.
A long-time friend of Indiana University, he will deliver a keynote address Tuesday at the Capitol Hill Colloquium sponsored by the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. The colloquium, an annual highlight for SPEA’s large Washington, D.C., alumni group, brings together political leaders, current and prospective students, SPEA administrators, alumni and staff.
Sen. Richard Lugar
Lugar might prefer to be back in Indiana campaigning. But he lost in the May 2012 Republican primary to Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer. So with the election weeks away, we’ve got Mourdock and Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly slugging it out over who will take his place.
The daily news cycle may have forgotten Lugar, but he won’t be overlooked by history, IU Bloomington political scientist Marjorie Hershey suggests in the latest issue of the Indiana Magazine of History, which is published by the IU Department of History.
The senator made major contributions to agriculture and energy policy and provided effective constituent services. “He will be remembered best,” Hershey writes, “for his contributions to foreign affairs and his service as the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”
His defining achievement was passage of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act in 1992, which created a program to contain the threat of Cold War-era nuclear and biological weapons. It has eliminated more nukes than the combined arsenals of France, China and the United Kingdom.
But addressing a global crisis doesn’t always win friends at home. Hershey writes that Lugar’s “activities as a statesman may have hurt him in the polls.” His age, 80, and the perception that he lived in Washington, not Indiana, added to his vulnerability. And outside money played a role: the Club for Growth, National Rifle Association and FreedomWorks spent $3 million on ads attacking Lugar.
Some pundits took Lugar’s defeat as a sign that moderates weren’t welcome in the Republican Party. But Hershey points out that Lugar’s voting record was quite conservative and aligned with other Republicans. By most measures, he’s not a centrist.
“A better word, in my view, might be ‘effective,’” Hershey writes, “by which I mean ‘adapted to the design of the American political system.’”
She notes that America’s Founding Fathers rejected a parliamentary system, in which a ruling party could implement its entire program, because they feared the tyranny of the majority. Instead they established a government balanced between branches and between federal, state and local powers. Elected officials would have to compromise to achieve their aims.
The lesson of Lugar’s loss, she says, may be that voters prefer a fighter to someone who gets things done – even if those things make the world safer.
“If party voters remain intent on punishing compromise,” Hershey writes, “then politics will become even more of a ‘dialogue of the deaf,’ in which civic engagement is the arena of the gladiator rather than the negotiator.”
