Your Vote - Man vs. Morel - NYTimes.com Our question for today is: How do you feel about the defeat of Senator Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary? The emphasis here is entirely on your feelings. We are in 2012, people. I know you may be reading this on your iPad, and that if things get boring you can immediately ditch me and go buy a pair of shoes or play Fruit Ninja. So, here we go. When I say "Richard Lugar," which one of these thoughts comes to mind? A) A standard-bearer for Senate civility who I was saddened to see squashed like a political bug. B) I am really happy that the Democrats will have a better chance to win the Indiana Senate seat against whatsisname. C) Richard Lugar is 80 years old! It's time for people like him to retire so slots will open up for deserving job-searchers like, say, me. D) Who is Richard Lugar? Does this have anything to do with the new hit movie, "The Avengers"? Because if it doesn't, I'm going to go play Angry Birds. Lugar got less than 40 percent of the votes in his primary Tuesday against Richard Mourdock, the 60-year-old state treasurer who tears up when he talks about the national deficit. One of the charming things about American politics is that it is still the one place in the country outside of opera audiences where a 60-year-old guy can count as a wild-eyed youngster. "It's not like I just popped up like a morel mushroom in the spring of agitation," Mourdock said last month, in an interview with ABC News. Personally, I am prepared to give a few points to any politician who compares himself to a morel mushroom. For the next six months, Democrats will be pointing out that when the Obama administration was attempting to save the automotive industry, Mourdock filed a lawsuit that could have stopped Chrysler's bankruptcy restructuring and cost Indiana 124,000 jobs. Mourdock, who called this his "Rosa Parks moment," said he was doing it to help protect pension fund investments. For comparing himself to Rosa Parks, I think we can take away the mushroom points. If nothing else, this was a really interesting primary. The National Rifle Association had a big presence, running ads for Mourdock that claimed Lugar "has changed," and was, therefore, deserving of an N.R.A. grade of F for sins like voting for the confirmations of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. This appears to be yet another sign of the gun lobby's desperate search for new red-meat issues now that it's won everything it ever asked for. Someday there may be no more day-care centers, airports or bars left to open up to concealed weapons carriers. But we will always have the Supreme Court. And many observers were asking whether the defeat of Lugar at the hands of a Tea Party favorite meant the death of the much-battered, near-moribund concept of bipartisanship. Mourdock apparently hopes so. "I have a mind-set that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view," he told Fox News after his victory. Lugar seemed to think so, too. His remarks about Mourdock during his concession speech made Rick Santorum's endorsement of Mitt Romney sound like a marriage proposal. "He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mind-set is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate." But there's absolutely no reason to believe that Indiana voters tossed their veteran senator out the door because he worked with the Democrats to end nuclear proliferation. The polls suggested they were more bothered by the fact that Lugar's voting address in Indiana was a house he sold in 1977. The voters probably would have forgiven him for that, too. But when "losing touch with his state" becomes a campaign issue, constituents do expect their representatives to go into a panic and do something dramatic to show that they get the message. If someone like, say, Chuck Schumer had been in Lugar's shoes, he would have immediately bought a house in Indiana and demanded that every TV station in the state come to film him mowing his new lawn in Terre Haute. Lugar just looked offended. Now it'll be Mourdock versus Representative Joe Donnelly, a popular Blue Dog Democrat who is already making it clear that he intends to run as the man who put the bi in bipartisan. There is no aisle he will not volunteer to reach across. And it really might work. But that's just one take. Tell me how you feel: A) Anything that makes the N.R.A. unhappy is O.K. by me. Go Joe Donnelly! B) I just reached the last Golden Egg level on Angry Birds. C) Look, the way the founders wrote the Constitution, you can only be bipartisan or immobilized. D) Remind me which one said he was a mushroom.