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" Richard Lugar, the Ent who has represented the state of Indiana in the U.S. Senate since shortly after George Rogers Clark kicked the bucket, is stuck in the middle of a primary dogfight with state treasurer Richard Mourdock, a Tea Party heartthrob. That being the case, one of the hottest issues in the race has been Lugar&amp;#039;s status as a &amp;quot;Washington insider,&amp;quot; since, as Tea Party logic demands, the more you know about how to function within the government, the less you know about Liberty (!), competence basically being another word for treason. Anyway, as a line of attack on this issue, Mourdock is making dinner out of how little time Lugar seems to spend back home in Indiana. While Lugar is still leading in the polls, the trend lines are not good at all, as evidenced by the fact that, over the weekend, his campaign felt compelled to release an accounting of how much time Lugar spent in the state as opposed to the amount of time he was sequestered inside the Beltway: The low point was 1985, when he was in Indiana for 20 days. That was the year he became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The highest number came in his re-election years of 1982 and 1998, when he was in the state 92 days. As for the total number of days he spent in the state he has represented since 1977 over the course of full six-year terms, the highest was his first term, with 353 days in Indiana, and the lowest was his fifth, with 237. This is the kind of thing a campaign does when it&amp;#039;s worried. During all those years in which he was spending that much time in Washington, the voters of Indiana clearly didn&amp;#039;t give a damn, because they kept re-electing Lugar year after year. Now, though, the basic functioning of the Republican mind has changed and it suddenly matters that you&amp;#039;ve sold your house in Indianapolis and bought one within the gates of Mordor by the Potomac. Is Richard Lugar still spry enough to outpace the flying monkeys? Stay tuned. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13238/richard-lugar-re-election-2012-7480254/>