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" From time to time, we&amp;#039;re going to be checking in on four U.S. Senate races, all of which are vital in their own way to the question of which party will control the World&amp;#039;s Greatest Deliberative ( and we do mean deliberative) Body come the beginning of 2013. Two we&amp;#039;ve already mentioned: the now apparently inevitable Politico-mania cage match for Edward Kennedy&amp;#039;s old seat in Massachusetts, between incumbent Republican senator Scott Brown Elizabeth Warren (with whom we visited this week), and the Montana race between Congressman Denny Rehberg (R-Rock Ridge) and incumbent Democrat Jon Tester (whom we shall investigate next week). The other two are in Indiana and Missouri.  Richard Lugar, who was once Richard Nixon&amp;#039;s favorite mayor, has been a senator from Indiana for 36 years. (When Lugar was a young Naval officer, he briefed the president. That would be President Eisenhower, by the way, which is nine-and-a-half or ten presidents ago, depending on how you reckon with Gerald Ford.) He is widely pointed out to tourists as The Last Sensible Republican. (It is easy to point him out because he lacks the lateral speed he had in his youth and is often mistaken for one of the bronze statues in the Capitol.) He is also widely credited with being less oily than his departed Indiana colleague Evan Bayh. (Again, not hard. So is a salamander.) Nonetheless, according to the really, really conservative types in Indiana (Memo From The Chamber of Commerce: Last State To Elect A Klansman Governor. Top That, Mississippi!) have decided that Lugar&amp;#039;s time has come and gone. The state treasurer, a useful suit named Richard Mourdock, is running against Lugar in the Republican primary on the grounds that Lugar is out of step with the modern conservative movement, which is to say that the average medical professional will not look at Lugar and prescribe Thorazine on sight. One of Lugar&amp;#039;s sins \u2014 supporting the new START arms-control treaty with Russia about which Mitt Romney knows so very little. If Mourdock wins, there&amp;#039;s life in the old Tea Party yet. If Lugar wins, well, nothing much will happen at all. As it happens, George Will loves Mourdock for a case in which Mourdock got a nuisance suit ignored by the most pro-business Supreme Court since the Gilded Age: Mourdock, however, earned the admiration of national conservatives, and of people who are partial to the rule of law, when he rightly, if unsuccessfully, contested in court the terms of Obama&amp;#039;s Chrysler bailout. Elsewhere, former senator John Danforth, the mournful old ecclesiastical basset-hound whose lasting contribution to the Republic is the presence of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, has publicly stated that a defeat for Lugar would cause him not to recognize his Grand Old Party any more. Not that it matters since, like Lugar, pigeons now roost on Danforth for relaxation. But Mourdock&amp;#039;s campaign, backed by FreedomWorks \u2014 last seen dressing pensioners up in free T-shirts and pretending to be the Sons of Liberty \u2014 needs to get its feet more solidly on the ground. Or at least it needs to stop at the next gas station and buy a map. The last of our Races of Import is Claire McCaskill&amp;#039;s attempt to hang onto the Senate seat she won six years ago in Missouri. The Democratic Party really needs this one, which is too bad for them, because McCaskill has turned into something of a lemon. She went soft in the face of the opposition in the House regarding an extension of unemployment benefits beyond 99 weeks. She also demonstrated her &amp;quot;bipartisanship&amp;quot; by signing onto a truly crappy deficit-reduction plan with Tennessee Republican Bob Corker. And you have to love a Democratic senator who, a full year out from the election, and planning to campaign on the same ticket with the president, stakes out as a point of pride the fact that the president &amp;quot;knows I&amp;#039;m not a vote he can count on.&amp;quot; If a Republican senator had said that about George W. Bush, even in the darkest days of 2006, they&amp;#039;d still be looking for the body. And then, of course, there is her analysis of what&amp;#039;s Really Wrong in Washington. &amp;quot;What worries me the most is that people out there are so disgusted with all of us that they just say, you know, a pox on all your houses \u2014 you&amp;#039;re all worthless. They don&amp;#039;t realize that perhaps people need to be discerning and realize who is really willing to compromise and take a moderate position.&amp;quot; (This is my head. This is my desk. Boom.) McCaskill&amp;#039;s already hit a couple of snags. She got caught up in an arcane ethics wrangle regarding the reimbursement of the cost of a private plane she&amp;#039;d used. (She and her husband sold the plane this week.) But she&amp;#039;s got a fat campaign account, and she&amp;#039;ll benefit from the fact that the Republican primary is going to be brutal and bloody. There are two established candidates \u2014 Congressman Todd Akin and former Missouri state treasurer Sarah Steelman, neither of whom have a bean to bless themselves with. There&amp;#039;s also a wild-card in St. Louis businessman Jon Brunner, a hand-sanitzer magnate who calls himself &amp;quot;Jon The Job Creator&amp;quot;, and who&amp;#039;s making up for not knowing much about politics by having lots of money to spend on what he does know about the issues, which ain&amp;#039;t much, either. He began this month with a major speech on the economy, and how he, as a businessman, can turn things around in this country, by god. Today, Jon The Job Creator&amp;#039;s company laid off a whole bunch of workers in several states. Your Democracy, ladies and gentlemen. Cherish it. CLICK HERE FOR MORE OF CHARLES P. PIERCE&amp;#039;S LONG READS &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and on the Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a11498/2012-senate-races-6533466/>