WASHINGTON – When Barack Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004, he received a congratulatory note from the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations…
WASHINGTON – When Barack Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004, he received a congratulatory note from the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Richard Lugar’s outreach to the up-and-coming Democrat helped give Obama the foreign relations experience he needed to boost his future presidential bid. But Lugar’s willingness to work with Obama contributed to his 2012 primary defeat by a Tea Party Republican.
As the announcement of Lugar’s death Sunday prompted an outpouring of praise for his career, one tribute stood out.
“In Dick, I saw someone who wasn’t a Republican or Democrat first, but a problem-solver,” Obama said in a statement, “an example of the impact a public servant can make by eschewing partisan divisiveness to instead focus on common ground.”
Obama had talked about the problems of nuclear proliferation in his Senate campaign and Lugar saw a potential bipartisan partner for the signature issue he’d previously worked on with Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia.
Lugar invited Obama to join him on one of his regular fact-finding trips to Russia to oversee implementation of the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to secure and destroy weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union.
