In 2004, Indiana's longtime Republican senator, Richard Lugar, was intrigued by his newly elected colleague from next-door Illinois, a young Democrat named Barack Obama.
In Obama, the older man saw someone unabashedly interested in foreign policy and complimentary of the veteran senator's work on historic nuclear disarmament legislation, says longtime congressional correspondent John T. Shaw.
"Lugar understood that Obama was smart, interested in foreign policy and would bring star power" to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he chaired, says Shaw, author of the book Richard G. Lugar, Statesman of the Senate: Crafting Foreign Policy From Capitol Hill.
What Lugar could not have imagined at the time was that his characteristically collegial relationship with the future president would play a key role in ending his Senate run after 36 years.
There were many reasons for Lugar's loss Tuesday to Tea Party favorite Richard Mourdock in Indiana's Republican Senate primary. He turned 80 last month and ran a poor campaign. He was battered for not owning a home in the state and accused of being out of touch. He voted for the stimulus and the auto industry bailout.
But it was his friendship with Obama that, in the cauldron of hyperpartisanship, was most vividly turned against him by his own party. His well-known even-keel statesmanship, once admired in a state where he ran unopposed six years ago, was turned into his most glaring deficit.
