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.”