The National Review has endorsed Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in his heated May 8 primary challenge against veteran Sen. Richard Lugar.
Conventional wisdom says the six-term incumbent Lugar has a better chance than Mourdock in the general election, the magazine’s editors write. “But the primary has heretofore shown Lugar to be out of touch with Hoosiers, an institutionalized Capitol Hiller who for a spell was ruled ineligible to vote in his own primary after a local board determined he hadn’t owned a home in Indiana in three decades.”
Bottom line: “Lugar has become a carpetbagger in his own state,” the editors say.
They have a much different view of Mourdock. His “mantra has been ‘capable, competent, and conservative,’ a line he used last week after a fine performance in his sole debate with Lugar, and one that could describe our impression of the man after he met with National Review editors recently,” they write.
Mourdock has shown himself to be a Reagan conservative, the editors say. They note that he’s a successful oil geologist with an interest in economist Milton Friedman. And they laud his unsuccessful suit to recover $6 million of state pension fund losses that were triggered “when the Obama administration’s auto bailouts arbitrarily rewrote a century of bankruptcy law.”
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