TheAgitator.com
Frist for Majority Leader
Sunday, December 8th, 2002If GOP politicos have a lick of PR-savvy in them, they’ll dump Trent Lott. Immediately. I’m a little late to the story, but in case you missed it, Lott made a really unfortunate comment in a C-SPAN televised tribute to Strom Thurmond on Friday. Excerpt:
Senate Republican leader Trent Lott of Mississippi has provoked criticism by saying the United States would have been better off if then-segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond had won the presidency in 1948.Speaking Thursday at a 100th birthday party and retirement celebration for Sen. Thurmond (R-S.C.) in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Lott said, “I want to 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.”
Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, was the presidential nominee of the breakaway Dixiecrat Party in 1948. He carried Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and his home state. He declared during his campaign against Democrat Harry S. Truman, who supported civil rights legislation, and Republican Thomas Dewey: “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches.”
On July 17, 1948, delegates from 13 southern states gathered in Birmingham to nominate Thurmond and adopt a platform that said in part, “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.”
I suppose it’s possible that Lott merely got carried away in his efforts to praise Thurmond. I don’t know. On the one hand, there really are times when I think that Trent Lott would be happy in a country with a Dixiecrat president. But on the other hand, he’s also a seasoned politician. It’s hard for me to see how he could have actually planned and prepared such a remark without foreseeing its inevitable political repercussions. That makes me think it was off the cuff. Of course, if that’s the case, then you have to wonder if the slip was Freudian. Whatever the case, his office needs to address the remark head-on, and not merely dismiss the imbroglio with the throwaway excuse, “the media is reading too much into this.”
And if I were Bill Frist or Don Nickles or Chuck Hagel, I’d start testing the waters for a challenge to Lott. He’s just too Mississippi to lead a national party.
I should also disclose that I happen to be an acquaintance of Lott’s press secretary Ron Bonjean, who’s quoted in the article.
UPDATE: Yowza! Seems there’s ample sentiment in the blogosphere for Lott’s ouster. Instapundit has the round-up.
Since you have a contact within Mr. Lott’s circle, you might sugest that Mr. Lott take a look at “www.dumptrentlott.com”. He already knows that his problem is not left wingers and democrats but his own party, especially the right wing of it, that apprehends the harm that his remarks caused to his party and realizes the damage his too late and disingeuous apologies caused to himself. For him to claim that he meant no harm while not explaining what it might have been that he *was* trying to say, is contemptuous of the intelligence of all who recognize the all too obvious meaning of his words. It’s no less insulting than Clinton’s disputing the meaning of the word “is” during his deposition.