Trent Lott either meant what he said, or he didn't. In either case, if Lott does not resign voluntarily as Senate majority leader, his Republican colleagues should fire him.
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| | | Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com). | |
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At the 100th birthday party for retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond on Dec. 5, Lott noted that his home state of Mississippi had voted for Thurmond when he ran for president in 1948. "We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead," Lott continued, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
Thurmond, then the governor of South Carolina, was the candidate of the Dixiecrat Party, whose sole reason for being was to preserve segregation. So more than a few people wonder what "problems" Lott had in mind that he thought would have been averted had Thurmond been elected in 1948. Blacks in public schools? Blacks voting? Blacks buying a home in Lott's neighborhood?
"Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong," President Bush said yesterday. "Recent comments by Sen. Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country."
I don't believe Lott is a bigot who longs for the "good old days" when blacks in the South were denied civil rights. I think he went overboard in an oleaginous tribute to a remarkable man who long ago (at least in public) repented of his segregationist ways.
But I'm not entirely sure. The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., reported this week that in 1980 Lott, a member of the House of Representatives at the time, had made a very similar remark at a campaign event at which Thurmond spoke. And Lott did get his start in politics as an aide to Sen. James Eastland, D-Miss., arguably the biggest racist in Congress at that time.
And Doug Thompson, in his web log, The Rant, quotes two former Senate staffers who said they have heard Lott utter racial slurs in private.
The only possible defense for Lott -- that he is an idiot, not a bigot -- is an insufficient reason to keep him in a leadership position.
It was conservative webloggers like Thompson who first expressed indignation over Lott's remark.
Reporters for mainstream journals largely overlooked it in their accounts of the birthday party for Thurmond, but Glenn Harlan Reynolds (www.instapundit.com) and Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com) immediately called for Lott's head, swiftly to be joined by David Frum and Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online, and Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard.
Lott made his remark on a Thursday. After Reynolds, Sullivan et al. had been banging on him over the weekend, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the rest of the usual suspects joined in the criticism the following Monday.
Some have noted more than a little hypocrisy in the belated outrage being expressed by Jackson and Sharpton. In an interview with Fox News on March 4, 2001, Sen. Robert Byrd spoke of "white [epithet deleted]." This passed with barely a word of criticism from black leaders. On Oct. 22 of this year, Bill Clinton travelled to Fayetteville, Ark., for a dedication of a statue to the late Sen. William Fulbright, D-Ark., the Vietnam War dove who was also a rabid segregationist. Again, not a peep from Jackson or Sharpton.
But what Byrd and Clinton said can be distinguished from what Lott said. Byrd issued a prompt and abject apology. "The phrase dates back to my boyhood, and has no place in today's society," he said. "As for my language, I had no intention of casting aspersions on anyone else's race."
Compared with what Byrd said, Lott's apology has been lame.
And Clinton praised Fulbright the man without giving the appearance of endorsing Fulbright's noxious views on race.
Trent Lott is a nice guy. There is no other way to explain why he is in a leadership position. It certainly isn't competence. When last Lott was majority leader, Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., routinely ate his lunch.
It's a harsh punishment to lose one's job because of what I hope and pray was a stupid but innocent remark, misconstrued.
But it is better that Lott suffer for what he said than that the Republican Party be tainted because of what he said.
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