Will The Cavemen Win In Indiana Tomorrow?

Tomorrow is primary day in North Carolina and concern is great that the Republicans will manage to pass their hate-filled Amendment One. Aside from that, Blue America is most concerned with the election in the western part of the state where two progressives, Cecil Bothwell (NC-11) and state Rep. Patsy Keever (NC-10) face off against two bigoted conservatives recruited against them by DCCC's chairman Steve Israel, respectively, Hayden Rogers and Terry Bellamy. Blue America has endorsed both Bothwell and Keever and late polling shows both of them with leads although each is being heavily outspent with DC lobbyist money pouring into North Carolina at the direction of Steny Hoyer, Steve Israel and their Blue Dog caucus. But there's another state going to the polls tomorrow as well, Indiana. And there the focus is on the Republican primary for the Senate seat Richard Lugar has held since... believe it or not, 1976!

The dynamics of the race are such that the populist right is trying to knock off Lugar for being "too mainstream." (By way of comparison, his crucial vote ProgressivePunch lifetime score is 7.11-- neatly between Alabama reactionary Richard Shelby's 7.29 and Kentucky teabagger Rand Paul's 7.06; in the current session, Lugar has moved way right and his score is 3.49, more extreme right than Mike Lee, David Vitter, Richard Burr, Saxby Chambliss or Pat Roberts.) They're running a far right teabagger against him, Richard Mourdock, Indiana's deranged Treasurer. The latest polling has Mourdock beating Lugar by 10-- 48-38%. The radical right's gripe with Lugar, aside from having been in office forever, is that voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court and that he favors the START Treaty, the DREAM Act and a rational approach to immigration and gun control. In yesterday's Washington Post Dana Milbank put the race in near apocalyptic terms, claiming tomorrow's voters will be choosing between party and country! Milbank wants to talk about Lugar's record in foreign policy but the only way to talk about the Indiana Republican primary is through the lens of Chris Moody's two latest books, The Republican Brain and The Republican War On Science.

On one side is a man who has made it his life’s work to build a cross-aisle consensus for keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states. On the other side is a man who mocks his opponent for such efforts and who talks more about fighting Democrats than fighting America’s enemies.

For years Dick Lugar has been the leading Senate Republican on foreign policy, shaping post-Cold War strategy, securing sanctions to end South African apartheid and bringing democracy to the Philippines, among other things. His signature achievement, drafted with Democrat Sam Nunn, was the 1992 Nunn-Lugar Act, which has disarmed thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads once aimed at the United States.

Enter Richard Mourdock, a tea party hothead attempting to defeat Lugar in the GOP primary. A cornerstone of his effort to oust Lugar is the six-term senator’s bad habit of bipartisanship-- never mind that Lugar’s bipartisanship was in the service of protecting millions of Americans from nuclear, chemical and biological terrorism.

See that Mourdock ad up top. It isn't untrue... it's just misleading. Even Republican lizard brains might stop and think if they knew that the bill President Obama was talking about when he said he worked with Dick Lugar was a bill to, in Obama's own words, conveniently cut off by the Mourlocks, "pass a law that will secure and destroy some of the world’s deadliest, unguarded weapons" [and] "to help lock down loose nuclear weapons.” Mourdock's whole campaign is based on the right-wing premise that "the time for being collegial is past. It's time for confrontation." The GOP lizard brains like that. It's the kind of thinking that led to the Civil War... and that's just where the new GOP, basically a Confederate Party with reactionary opportunists like Mourdock, Scott Walker, Rick Santorum and Rick Snyder in tow, would like to lead the country. "There is a great deal to dislike in Mourdock’s message," explains Milbank, "but the most egregious part is his underlying contention that Lugar should be punished for cooperating with the other party-- even though such cooperation protects the country against unimaginable destruction. That’s not just wrong; it’s unpatriotic."

As Mourdock piles up support from the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Grover Norquist, Lugar is still clinging to the notion that substance matters; this week, his office issued a news release titled “Lugar Announces Elimination of Weapons of Mass Destruction through Nunn-Lugar.”

Some Democrats hope that Mourdock beats Lugar because it would increase the likelihood that Democrat Joe Donnelly will win the seat in November.

But Donnelly is hardly a Democrat. An extreme right-wing Blue Dog, Donnelly is basically running for Senate in the hope that Mourdock beats Lugar and independent and even mainstream Republican voters decide they'd rather vote for a conservative Democrat than a deranged neo-fascist sociopath. Donnelly is an anti-gay, anti-Choice, anti-healthcare fanatic who, in the current session, has voted far more frequently with Boehner and Cantor than with the Democrats. His ProgressivePunch crucial votes score is a dismal 26.07, one of the half dozen most GOP-supporting Democrats. If he wins, Miss McConnell will be have more to be happy about than anyone who cares about passing progressive legislation.

Yesterday former Republican hero and governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger penned an OpEd for the L.A. Times that GOP lizard brains will reject out-of-hand. It's a shame Indiana primary voters won't have an opportunity to read it before they vote tomorrow. Schwarzenegger is distraught by the GOP's "recent loss of two up-and-coming Republicans: San Diego mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher, currently a state assemblyman, and former assemblyman and current Congressional candidate Anthony Adams, both of whom left the party to become independents. On the one hand, I respect their standing up for principle. On the other, I hate to see them go."

I'm sure they would have preferred to remain Republicans, but in the current climate, the extreme right wing of the party is targeting anyone who doesn't meet its strict criteria. Its new and narrow litmus test for party membership doesn't allow compromise.

I bumped up against that rigidity many times as governor. Not surprisingly, the party wasn't always too happy with me. But I had taken an oath to serve the people, not my party. Some advisors whose opinions I respect urged me to consider leaving the party and instead identify myself as a "decline to state" voter. But I'm too stubborn to leave a party I believe in.

...We need to remind the Republicans who want to enforce ideological purity that if they succeed, they will undo Reagan's work to create an inclusive party that could fit many different views.

An inclusive party would welcome the party's most conservative activists right alongside its most liberal activists. There is room for those whose views, I think, make them sound like cavemen. And there is also room for us in the center, with views the traditionalists probably think make us sound like progressive softies. What's important is our shared belief in the broad Republican principles of free enterprise and small government. If we continue to fight one another without being willing to compromise, we will keep losing to big-government advocates.

We need to welcome young leaders into the party and invite them to participate in a robust debate. Republicans love the free market, so it should seem like a no-brainer that the more views we have at the table, the better our final product will be.

To succeed, Republicans need to embrace true Reaganism, and that means embracing the true Reagan, a brave and independent leader who believed in solutions and compromise.

As governor, Reagan was never afraid to buck his party. He raised taxes when he saw no other way to get California out of the red, and he created the California Environmental Protection Agency because, as strongly as he believed in eliminating unnecessary government regulation, he also saw wisdom in protecting our natural resources.

As president, Reagan worked very well with Democrats to do big things. It is true that he worked to reduce the size of government and cut federal taxes and he eliminated many regulations, but he also raised taxes when necessary. In 1983, he doubled the gas tax to pay for highway infrastructure improvements.

Today, that would be enough for some of the ideological enforcers to start looking for a "real" conservative to challenge him in a primary.

Some Republicans today aren't even willing to have conversations about protecting the environment, investing in the infrastructure America needs or improving healthcare. By holding their fingers in their ears when those topics arise, these Republicans aren't just denying themselves a seat at the table; in a state such as California, they also deny a seat to every other Republican.

The GOP's history is filled with leaders who rejected ideology in favor of seeking solutions.

Teddy Roosevelt is still a hero among environmentalists for his conservationist policies. Dwight Eisenhower believed in the value of investing in infrastructure, and we can thank him for our highway system. Nixon, who originally attracted me to the party, nearly passed universal healthcare. He also created the national Environmental Protection Agency, which some modern Republicans want to close down.

Being a Republican used to mean finding solutions for the American people that worked for everyone. It used to mean having big ideas that moved the country forward.

It can mean that again, but big ideas don't often come from small tents.

It's time to stop thinking of the Republican Party as an exclusive club where your ideological card is checked at the door, and start thinking about how we can attract more solution-based leaders like Nathan Fletcher and Anthony Adams.