Trent Lott's Whole Lot Of Trouble

by Jim Lobe

Remarks by incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott last week that apparently supported racial segregation have badly embarrassed Republicans, some of whom say the legislator from Mississippi should step down. As majority leader, Lott controls the Senate and serves as the party's main spokesman on Capitol Hill.

After days of silence, President George W. Bush felt compelled to speak out Thursday, telling a Philadelphia audience that Lott's statement "is offensive [and] wrong," although his spokesman, Ari Fleischer, quickly released a statement insisting that Bush did not want Lott to resign his post.

But Republicans and Democrats predicted that Lott may still be forced out if the controversy persists into next week, while other Republicans, including some considered on the right of the party, insisted that Lott should leave anyway. "Senator Lott has fatally damaged his credibility and, therefore, his ability to lead effectively the Republican Party in the Senate," said a release distributed by the president of the Family Research Council, a powerful grassroots Christian Right group.

The row stems from Lott's remarks during a speech honoring the 100th birthday of retiring South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, who bolted the Democratic Party in 1948 to run for president as a "Dixiecrat" to protect Jim Crow laws passed by white state legislatures in the late 19th century to restore segregation to the south.

Thurmond, who later turned Republican, was staunchly opposed to federal government efforts to enact anti-lynching laws, integrate interstate highways and the military, and eliminate the poll tax that made it impossible for the vast majority of the South's, including Mississippi's, blacks to vote.

Ignoring the fact that Thurmond's own politics had moved substantially toward the center over the past half-century, Lott said, "I want to state this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we [in Mississippi] voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems all these years either."

The speech got little notice in the nation's newspapers the following day, but was carried live by the national public-access cable television network, C-Span. The result, according to Congressional aides, was hundreds of calls and e-mails to lawmakers, newspapers and electronic media expressing outrage.

Political writers and radio and television talk-show hosts, who are mostly on the right side of the political spectrum, soon picked up the story, and within just a few days, it was leading the news.

"This was one of the few situations I've seen where the public thinks something is more important than what the press thinks," said David Bositis, a political analyst for the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies, a think-tank that focuses on the situation of black citizens. "The fact is, the public was really very outraged by what Lott said."

Lott apologized in a written statement as soon as the story reached the Washington press, saying his remarks were a "poor choice of words." In the collegial, old-boys' ambiance of the Senate most of his colleagues, including Democrats, accepted the apology and shrugged it off.

But the popular controversy continued to grow, particularly amid mounting calls by members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), civil rights groups, and some Republican voices who insisted that an apology was not enough.

The brouhaha even succeeded in uniting estranged Jewish and Muslim groups. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League called Lott's remarks "irresponsible and unacceptable" and urged him to "reaffirm clearly and forcefully to the American people his commitment to civil rights," and the Muslim American Society declared him "unfit for any leadership position."

On Wednesday, reports that Lott had used almost identical language in a speech 22 years ago added fuel to the fire, prompting his Democratic counterpart Tom Daschle demand that Lott explicitly repudiate "the indefensible days of segregation."

Sen. John Kerry, a likely Democratic presidential candidate, and former Vice President Al Gore called on Lott to step down as majority leader. The top members of the black caucus called on Lott to resign from the Senate altogether, noting that his 1980 comments constituted "chilling confirmation that your remarks were not an inadvertent slip of the tongue."

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), pointed out that Lott's legislative record was consistent with support for segregation: He was one of a handful of lawmakers who voted against the extension of the Voting Rights Act and the observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday as a national holiday.

They recalled his past affiliation with an overtly racist group known as the Council of Conservative Citizens and his championship of Bob Jones University, which until recently segregated black and white students, as indicative of a pattern consistent with segregationist views.

"This is our [Jean Marie] Le Pen," said one Republican Congressional aide in a reference to the racist French leader whose second-place showing in French presidential elections this year shocked the nation. He was overwhelmingly defeated in the run-off against President Jacques Chirac.

Lott personally apologized at length again on Wednesday, insisting in interviews that his remarks were "terrible, poorly chosen and insensitive."

But his second attempt seemed only to inflame the situation. Editorials calling on him to step down as leader appeared in many national newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

One column by one of the country's most important neo-conservative writers, Charles Krauthammer, found in Lott's performance "evidence of a historical blindness that is utterly disqualifying for national office."

It was in that context that Bush spoke out Thursday, insisting that Lott's remarks "do not reflect the spirit of our country." Lott quickly issued another statement through his spokesman saying that he "agrees with President Bush that his words were wrong and he is sorry. He repudiates segregation because it is immoral," the spokesman said.

Whether this will quell the controversy remains to be seen, but analyst Bositis, for one, suggested that the Republicans would retain him as leader only at great risk.

"Lott has the worst record [on race relations] of his generation in the Senate," he said, "and this episode has shown that his views are simply outside the norms of the country. In a way, this is the best thing I've seen happen in a number of years."