Posted on: Sunday, December 22, 2002

EDITORIAL
What Lott's demise says about his party

Even Trent Lott's best friends wouldn't tell him. It took him several days to understand that he had been hung out to dry by his Republican colleagues.

It's appropriate that his announcement in stepping down from his position as Senate majority leader made no mention of his racially insensitive remark on Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday — appropriate because the remark and the resulting tempest provided cover for the leadership change, if not the real reason.

Some background:

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he said, "We just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."

What followed included party-switching by avowed segregationists like Thurmond to convince those who still wished to defend southern apartheid. A solid southern vote has been the keystone of the presidential campaigns of Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes.

Decrying the hypocrisy of some Republicans in anonymously clamoring to dump Lott, former President Bill Clinton told CNN last week: "I think what they are really upset about is that he made public their strategy."

That's one reason Lott became expendable in the eyes of his Republican colleagues and the White House. Indeed, while his denunciation of Lott's fatal remark at Thurmond's retirement party appeared ringing and heartfelt, President Bush has yet to disown such things as the prominence of the Confederate flag in the Georgia 2002 campaign.

A more practical reason Republicans abandoned Lott is that he would have presented an uncomfortable distraction for the upcoming Republican agenda, which features such racially sensitive questions as affirmative action, private school vouchers and appointment of some judges who make Lott look liberal.

A final reason for Lott's demise is that some of his more conservative colleagues resent the fact that he's been more legislator than raw ideologue. They want someone more of the scorched-earth school.

Several commentators have suggested that Lott's example provides a good occasion for a long overdue discussion about race in this country. But Republicans clearly hope to turn the page quickly, and Democrats are aware that such a discussion would expose their own dirty linen.

Meanwhile the relevance of the shameful record of the Jim Crow South fades as 21st century America more and more comes to resemble multicultural Hawai'i. Lott stood as an unpleasant reminder of that past, but that doesn't really explain his fall.