On this date in 2012, political observers awoke to news of election returns in the Midwest that challenged the conventional view that the Tea Party movement was past its expiration date. The news came out of Indiana, where Sen. Richard Lugar's long and distinguished political career came to an end in a Republican primary, courtesy of a Tea Party favorite named Richard Mourdock.
Notwithstanding the fact that Barack Obama narrowly carried Indiana in 2008 (his margin was some 28,000 votes out of 2.7 million cast), Indiana was one of the most reliably Republican states in the country. And Dick Lugar was its most popular Republican.
Lugar had served two terms as mayor of Indianapolis and was known inside the Nixon White House as the president's favorite mayor. Later, this would be a dubious distinction, but in 1972, Lugar was tapped as a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention. Every six years, he'd make mincemeat of a Democratic opponent -- winning general elections by margins of better than 2-1 -- until 2006 when the Democrats didn't even bother to field a candidate.
This, then, was the GOP icon who state treasurer Richard Mourdock figured he could knock off in a primary, with help from the Tea Party movement. Was Mourdock deluded? Not really, as it turned out. At least not about Lugar's vulnerability.
Richard Lugar's longevity and success in Washington turned out to be his Achilles heel. Long known as a consensus-builder, he was holding political office in a new era -- one in which the ability and willingness to compromise was becoming a liability. He generally voted to affirm judicial nominees of the opposition party, worked for bipartisan consensus in foreign policy, and considered earmarks a healthy way for members of Congress to represent hometown constituents. After Lugar supported the Obama administration's DREAM Act, 2012 primary opponent Richard Mourdock turned the old Nixon-era compliment on its head. Lugar, Mourdock said, was "President Obama's favorite senator."
By 2012, Lugar was old (80), was running for his seventh term, and hadn't lived in Indiana for years. Mourdock was good at reading the tea leaves, in other words. (Pun intended.) Mourdock proved less savvy in another area, however, dooming his general election campaign by opining that "when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen."
Although its critics blamed the Tea Party for such fiascos, the movement, which the national media never understood, was really about limited government. It's a thread running through American-style populism today, even if its liberal critics like to dismiss it as racism or transphobia and the like. By 2012, its critics had dismissed the Tea Party ethos as a spent force -- yesterday's cheese, a goner, old news, passé, so 2010, dead as a doornail. After Richard Lugar lost, this got me thinking, even back then, about Mark Twain.
In 1897, Twain was living in London, partly as a quest for peace and quiet (Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, and Piers Morgan not having yet been born). But the tabloid mentality was alive and well back then, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and rumors cropped up: Twain was destitute. Twain was ill. Twain was dead.
In June that year, a London correspondent for The New York Journal named Frank Marshall Wright showed up at Twain's doorstep and rather sheepishly showed the great man a couple of cables sent by his editors.
"If Mark Twain dying in poverty, in London, send 500 words."
"If Mark Twain has died in poverty send 1000 words."
Although a cousin of his had taken ill (and recovered), Twain was neither dying nor in poverty, and he provided the droll response that became instantly famous (and quickly bowdlerized): "The report of my illness grew out of his illness, the report of my death was an exaggeration."
