What Trent Lott’s ‘comeback’ means
As recently as a week ago, it seemed as if Sen. [tag]Lamar Alexander[/tag] (R-Tenn.) had just about wrapped up the race for Senate Minority Whip. But Sen. [tag]Trent Lott[/tag] (R-Miss.), who knows the behind-the-scenes game as well as anyone on the Hill, quietly lobbied his GOP colleagues and won a narrow vote today for the leadership post. This strikes me as pretty important for at least two reasons.
One, I think the Republican leadership has just about given up on its African-American outreach effort.
Nice to see that the segregation wing of the Republican Party can still muster a majority of votes in the Senate GOP caucus. Or as Matt Ygelsias put it yesterday:
“I’m confused. My recollection was that after Lott was exposed as a die-hard segregationist, the American conservative movement washed their hands of him and
made him a committee chairbanished him from the realm as a token of their commitment to the new rightwingery with twice the homophobia and half the racism. Now they’re going back on all that?”After running a race-baiting campaign against Harold Ford in Tennessee, the GOP bypasses the other senator from Tennessee to install a leader nostalgic for the Dixiecrats.
Hey, Ken Mehlman. How’s that outreach to African-American voters going?
After today, not particularly well. Lott has become synonymous with GOP racism. It became a national scandal in 2002 when Lott said, “I’ll say this about my state, when Strom Thurmond ran for president, we 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 over all these years, either.” But it goes much deeper, including segregationist measures he supported as a state lawmaker, and an appearance before the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group.
For Senate Republicans, Lott’s history was too much to bear in 2002, and under the White House’s orders, the caucus gave him the boot and replaced him with Bill Frist. Apparently, in 2006, the same caucus isn’t nearly as concerned about appearances — or impressing African-American voters who know Lott’s name very well.
In addition, I think it’s also worth noting that Lott’s ascension to the Senate GOP leadership again seems a bit like a slap in the White House’s face. The president, with varying degrees of subtlety, has made it clear that Lott is not his favorite member of the Senate.
Indeed, after Bush helped orchestrate his ouster, Lott said it was “payback time” and started becoming a thorn in the White House’s side, including stiffing the National Republican Senatorial Committee, balking at Bush’s first-term request for a dividend tax cut, and even calling for Karl Rove’s resignation after Scooter Libby was indicted.
This is not to say Lott somehow became more moderate — he clearly has not — but he certainly was less disposed to be a team player, at least as far as the White House was concerned. In March, for example, the president threatened to veto congressional efforts to derail the Dubai Ports World deal. Consider how Lott responded.
“I was offended,” Sen. Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, said of Mr. Bush’s threat last week to veto legislation aimed at stopping the transfer of port operations to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates. He said Mr. Bush “threatened me before I even knew the details of what was involved or whether I was going to vote for the bill or not.”
Mr. Lott said his immediate reaction was: “OK, big boy, I’ll just vote to override your veto.”
“Big boy”? Most GOP senators wouldn’t publicly mock the president like this, and when Bush still had political capital, anyone who did wouldn’t be eligible for the Senate leadership.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but Lott’s promotion seems like a subtle statement to the president from the Senate GOP caucus: “You’re a lame duck, and we’re not exactly reading from the same playbook anymore.”
Anyone who doesn’t think the GOP is the party of the South should just look at people like Trent
Trent Lott could sing “Mammy” in blackface in Macy’s window at high noon, and people of colour would never trust him. Start a rumour that he intended to bring back horsewhipping, and it’d take of like the Space Shuttle – because it’s believable. The GOP’s choice merely reflects a continuing (and gratifying) appetite for its own flesh. What is a continually-building mystery to me is what audience they are now trying to appease.
the new rightwingery with twice the homophobia and half the racism.
I know funny and THAT’S funny.
I think this really starts to support the point that is beginning to be voice after the election results that the GOP is becoming more and more just a Southern party, truly the Dixiecrats. Good, let them become more and more entrenched in ideas that are increasingly out of favor with the rest of America.
They are becoming increasingly out of favor with the rest of America, right?
Maybe this explains why Martinez was nominated as head of RNC the Repubs want to have their cake and eat it too….
Racist #2 Senatorial Repub
&
Hispanic RNC leader….hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
The Conservative revolution is over and dead…..
The party will fragment into a million little pieces and will never again be able to reconcile all the warring factions within the conservative movement…
Anyone who doesn’t think the GOP is the party of the South should just look at people like Trent
Or Senator-elect Bob Corker.
Don’t forget Bush promised to rebuild Trent’s destroyed plantation home.
yes, the Repugnicans have become the Party of the South…… and will go increasingly to the right.
I always said, we Northerners never should have gone to war to keep them in the Union. We would be a much better off country without them. Think about it. They are the source of most of our problems and most of our hurricanes; they are our embarrassment around the world and they have all the military bases that suck the $$$ out of the Northeast and West Coast.
Yes, doll collectors….we even have a Trent Lott. KKKeep your kkkids happy, buy them a Trent Lott doll!
Take a look at our other dolls. (Comment #26)
I agree that it’s either the South flexing its muscles within the Republicans or some sad idea that they are going back to pre-extremist Republicanism that Lott somehow represents over Frist.
Like Homer said, more power to them.
Vote Trent, because nothing sticks it to Boy George II more for his assinine campaign appearances.
Yes, BG2, if you’d just stayed in the White House (or maybe at Crawford) you might still have the Senate today and Trent certainly would not have a leadership post.
This vote not only tells BG2 that he’s a lame duck but says the Republican’t Senate blames him for it. 😉
“[the South has] all the military bases that suck the $$$ out of the Northeast and West Coast.” – Mike D
If you had any idea of how poluted military bases are you’d appreciate the clever scheme Northerners used to convince Sam Nunn to move them all to Georgia. Putting military bases in the South is the ultimate example of NIMBY.
It is hard to say Lott’s resurgence is based on the South making a statement when the loser in this leadership race was also from the south (Lamar!).
I think it does say, loud and clear, that the Rethugs disagree with the pundits who are saying last week was a triumph of the middle and that moderation is the future. Given a choice between a thoughtful, lower-key, relatively technocratic moderate and a good ol’ boy flamethrowing winger, the caucus chose the latter. One can only hope the general public was taking note.
The GOP lost any hope of minority support in the aftermath of Katrina. I think this had a large effect on the recent election. This just shows that the GOP is well aware of this and past even pretending to care.
This also adheres to the recent delusional talking point that George Bush actively threw the election because of his inherent liberalism. I lol every time I hear this.
I’ve always thought that the racism thing was just a convenient excuse to replace Lott with someone much dumber and more loyal to Bush. And also to help establish Frist’s leadership credentials, in preparation for a presidential run. Dumbasses.
I posted this original on a previous thread,
but I’ll re-post here since it is particularly germaine…
While you would think that Lott has forfeited any support from the black community, he clearly has not because he was re-elected by a huge margin this year, capturing 64% of the vote. Mississippi is 37% black, so some of that support had to come from the black community.
My Quaker abolitionist great-great-great grandfather, a founder of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, has likely now spun out of his grave and into orbit at how the party he worked to hard for has become the party of Southern treason that he opposed all his life. He was so abolitionist and pro-Union that when his son left Meeting to join the Army, he threatned to take back the land he had given for the meeting house if they kicked his son out for fighting. That the Republicans are now the Confederacy Party…
Quack! Thump!
Quack! Thump!
Quack! Thump!
All we need is Dick “Elmer Fudd” Cheney and his blunderbus to put this lame duck down.
Or, if we don our tin foil chapeau:
The ReThugs encourage Dems to thumb their noses as Emperor El Presidente with random acts of defiance (Lott, Martinez).
Bush responds by declaring the entire Senate enemy combatants and gets them all locked up.
Only the ReThugs are cleared of charges.
Hey, the DieVote thing didn’t happen so I have to conspiritize about something.
Actually, the positioning of Trent Lott in a position of political power is a super-double-secret plot by a small, dedicated band of Democratic freedom-fighters (led by the illustrious and almighty Spiritual Grand PooBah of the Party, the Right Honorable Dr. Howard Dean) to encourage George to fling himself from the doorway of Marine One (his helicopter) while hovering directly above Marine Two (his other helicopter) in mid-flight. The plan is to have Cheney, Gonzo, Ricecake, SnowFlake, and the archnemesis of Truth, the Evil James Carville, aboard Marine Two when George introduces his scrawny hide to the main rotors.
Hey—with all the fiction those clowns have proffered as “thuth” for the pasty decade or so, I thought I’d try my hand at writing “fiction….”
“It is hard to say Lott’s resurgence is based on the South making a statement when the loser in this leadership race was also from the south (Lamar!).” – Zeitgeist
Draw a line along the Georgia/Florida border that stretches to the Rocky Mountains. If you live North of that border, everybody who lives north of you is a Yankee. If you live south of that border in Florida, everybody who lives south of you is a Yankee.
Thus, by this simple rule it is seen that Trent is a Southern Gentleman and Lamar is a Yankee dog.
Believe me, living in Northern Virginia and having traveled to the Carolinas, I know this to be true.
Read it and gag alert: Bush tries to ram through judicial nominees including Mike “No Civil Rights for You” Wallace: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2006/11/15/one-more-time-for-judicial-nominees/
Note: Wallace was an aide of, guess who? so this isn’t entirely OT.
All we need is Dick “Elmer Fudd” Cheney and his blunderbus to put this lame duck down. — TAIO, @16
“I’m not saying the President is a lame duck, but Dick Cheney shot him today” — B.Maher
And yes, the “orange thing” seems to have stabilized today (hasn’t eaten any of my first tries so far. Knocking on her head), but I don’t trust it anyway, so won’t change *my* sig for a while. I think I lost my trusting gene somewhere around Nov ’02