Ahead of Tuesday's Republican Senate primary in Indiana, six-term incumbent Dick Lugar has a message for Hoosier voters: "At this point, help."
Lugar is trailing his conservative challenger, state treasurer Richard Mourdock, in a new poll released Friday. The Evansville Courier & Press reports that at a press conference soon after the poll was released, Lugar entreated voters of all political stripes to support him over Mourdock:
Just after the poll’s release, Lugar held a 20-minute news conference where he listed off a set of constituencies – farmers, labor unions, veterans, Jews, women, and ethnic minorities – that he said should support him, given what he’s done for them.
“I believe that right now, if a majority of Hoosiers were to vote in an election – that is all Hoosiers, regardless of party, Republicans, independents, Democrats – I would win. I have a majority support in our state,” Lugar said.
“I want everybody in the state to vote for me on Tuesday – everybody. I’m not asking anybody to cross over. I’m just saying, positively register your vote, because if you do not, I may not be able to continue serving you. At this point, help. I would say it is very, very important that people get there, and they get there fast.”
Lugar also said Mourdock is "simply unqualified to handle the complex situations in our world today" and warned voters not to elect an unqualified person to the Senate.
Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, a Lugar protege who has endorsed and supported his mentor in this race, told the Courier & Press that he would support Mourdock in the general election and that Mourdock could win against the Democratic challenger, congressman Joe Donnelly:
...if Mourdock wins, Daniels said he’ll have no trouble supporting him.
“He’s a thoroughly credible person – you know, a friend and ally of mine,” Daniels said. “I was in an awkward position, to say the least, here, between two people I know and like and admire. But one of them, I have a lifelong loyalty to, and that was the tiebreaker.”
Lugar’s campaign charged that Mourdock would face a much tougher battle in the fall against Donnelly than Lugar would. Daniels said “maybe so,” but that Mourdock’s chances if that’s the case “are much better than even of succeeding.”
We had an excellent example of the statesmanship missing in our public affairs a few minutes after the president high-fived his way out of the House chamber when Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels offered the Republican response.
In his last work, The Responsible Electorate (1966), the great scholar V.O. Key argued against the thinking of political scientists of his age that the mass public was too ill-informed to make wise decisions:
New York senator Chuck Schumer commented on Mitch Daniels's Republican response to the State of the Union Address at a press conference today on Capitol Hill. "The Republican speaker last night, Mitch Daniels, talked about Americans must talk about the state of the union as grave," Schumer said. "So, we think we are in great shape. We are in good shape."
TheNew York Times writes about Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who will give the Republican response to the State of the Union address tonight, and reports:
I’ve got to think Monday night’s debate further swelled the groundswell of support for Mitch Daniels. The liveliest part of the debate was at the beginning, when Mitt went after Newt—and Republicans all over America watched with fascinated horror at the thought that these are the two GOP frontrunners.
Matt McKillip, a representative of www.runmitchrun.com, earlier today on Fox News:
And the boss himself also mentioned that there was support for Indiana governor Mitch Daniels to make a late entry into the GOP primary and spoke more generally about the race:
Ross Douthat, writing on the New York Times’s website, has a must-read article on the Republican presidential field and the desirability—and even possibility!—of a new entry. “For months now, even as the rest of the conservative commentariat has gradually resigned itself to the existing presidential field, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol has continued to pine — publicly, unstintingly, immune to either embarrassment or fatigue— for another candidate to jump into the race,” Douthat writes.
One South Carolina factoid I haven't seen commented on elsewhere: Rick Santorum ran closer to Mitt Romney than Romney did to Newt Gingrich. Romney and Gingrich are the front-runners, but any of the three could be the nominee.
This morning, the Republican leadership on the Hill announced that Indiana governor Mitch Daniels would deliver the GOP response Tuesday night to President Obama’s State of the Union Address.
Chris Christie gave an impressive speech at the Reagan Library last night. But by far the most interesting moment was an exchange from the question and answer session.
Although Indiana governor Mitch Daniels would like to see his New Jersey counterpart run for president, Daniels said today that he doesn't see any signs Chris Christie will change his mind. “I personally didn’t press him, so I have nothing to report,” Daniels said of his meeting last Thursday with Christie. “I saw no evidence that he’s going to change his mind.”
