IN Tea Party Targets Lugar

The Wall Street Journal reports:

REYNOLDS, Ind.—Two meetings in recent days in this Midwestern state showed the predicament facing Sen. Richard Lugar, a six-term Republican with a centrist profile, as he runs for re-election next year.

When Mr. Lugar came to this farming town of 500 people Saturday to build bridges with a local tea-party group, he found mostly skepticism.

"You seem to feel you're somehow indispensable in Washington," Bob Callahan, 65, a retired salesman from Monticello, told the senator at meeting in an elementary-school gym. He compared Mr. Lugar to the professional football quarterback Brett Favre, saying: "There's nothing sadder than an athlete that doesn't know when to get out."

Eighty miles south in Indianapolis about 40 people huddled Friday with FreedomWorks, a group based in Washington, D.C., that helps coordinate tea-party groups across the U.S. On the agenda, in a closed-door meeting in a hotel ballroom, was how to unify behind a Republican to challenge Mr. Lugar in next year's primary. "Our knuckles are going to get bloody," said Monica Boyer, 35, a secretary and mother of four with Hoosiers for Conservative Senate.

Tea-party groups have decided their main Republican target in the next election is Mr. Lugar, a 78-year-old foreign policy specialist who, along with Orrin Hatch of Utah, is his party's longest-serving senator. Tea-party groups also may become active in Republican primaries to unseat Mr. Hatch and Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine

Indiana activists were upset with Mr. Lugar's vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which pumped billions of dollars into ailing financial institutions during the financial crisis of 2008, his support for President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominees and his willingness to work with Democrats. Another point of tension: Mr. Lugar's role in working with Mr. Obama to shepherd the New Start nuclear arms treaty with Russia through the Senate late last year.

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