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was returning $14,500 to the government for nights he
had spent in Indiana hotel rooms during adjournments
— a technical oversight of a Senate expenses rule, but
one more reminder of his long time away. All the while,
the onslaught of ads and critiques came, denouncing
Mr. Lugar as a friend of President Obama, recipient of
an F­-rating from the N.R.A., and someone who once
opposed a ban on earmarks and supported the Dream
Act. Mr. Lugar, who dismissed claims of a closeness to
President Obama, is unapologetic for working the
other side of the aisle, an approach that in the 1990s
brought the accomplishment for which he may be best
known — a program, with Sam Nunn, a Democratic
senator, for disarmament in the former Soviet Union.
“It’s a fact of life,” Mr. Lugar said, “if you are a legislator
for any period of time, and if you are attempting to
pass what you believe is very constructive legislation
for the country, either domestically or in terms of
foreign policy, that in the Congress of the United
States, you’re going to deal with members of the other
party.” Mr. Mourdock has told audiences, like the one
at a recent Rotary breakfast in Noblesville, that
bipartisanship has taken the nation to the brink of
bankruptcy. “The time for being collegial is past,” Mr.
Mourdock said in an interview. “It’s time for
The New York Times/ ­- Politics, Ter, 17 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
confrontation.” A former coal executive who remains
far less known among Indiana voters, Mr. Mourdock
lauded Tea Party members for their support and grew
teary­-eyed when reflecting on the devotion of a large
Tea Party group he addressed several years ago. Still,
Mr. Mourdock, who first won election as state treasurer
in 2006, recoils at the way he says Mr. Lugar has tried
to paint him: in Mr. Mourdock’s words, as a “wild­-eyed
Tea Party candidate.” Back inside Mr. Lugar’s
campaign office last week, volunteers gushed over his
debate performance a night earlier, his first such
debate in a dozen years after Democrats did not even
field an opponent in 2006. Pamela Altmeyer Alvey, a
volunteer, recalled how friends, including one who is
upward of 80, had voiced doubt about Mr. Lugar
before the debate but sounded different now. “They
said, ‘He was so vibrant!’ ” Ms. Altmeyer Alvey told the
senator. If finding himself in a battle now, in his 36th
year in the Senate, feels insulting or painful or a little
awkward, Mr. Lugar is not saying. “I’ve long since
forgotten about whether it’s odd,” he said. “This is just
what I do all my life. And so we just take each day as
happily as possible, look at it as optimistically as we
can.”
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