Word: lott
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they tended to look to the courts, whose juries could be quite populist. Southern Mississippi is home to a small but aggressive plaintiff's bar, featured twice over the past year on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and on episodes of 60 Minutes. For all of Lott's passion for tort reform, one of the nation's wealthiest tormentors of tobacco companies is his brother-in-law Dick Scruggs, beside whose pool the majority leader can often be found, sipping a Coke and working his cell phone, whenever the Senate is out and the weather is warm...
...part, Clinton sees Lott as the kind of Southerner who eagerly sought to join the local power structure and didn't give a damn about those who didn't enjoy the same opportunities. No one has ever accused Lott of using racist language or appeals, but Clinton looks askance at Lott's voting record: against extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; against the federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.; against a memorial for civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi; in favor of extending tax breaks to segregated schools. Political consultant Dick Morris, who has worked...
Democratic Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, who is also close to both Lott and Clinton, considers the majority leader a compassionate man but one who does not believe government needs to compensate for past injustices. "Trent thinks that if he could make it, anybody can" and that Washington should provide the kind of help he got through such programs as college loans instead of fostering welfare dependency, Breaux says. "Bill Clinton emphasizes that even if you started out working class, you still have to realize that some people have a harder time working their way up than you did because...
...Trent Lott's attitudes toward the role of government and racial issues were shaped by his upbringing in Pascagoula, which was quite different from most of the South. The town was defined by the Ingalls shipyard, which offered training and good wages and lured workers from all over the region. Most workers reckoned that whatever the state and local governments did to satisfy Ingalls--and the paper mill and the oil refinery and the shrimp-and crab-processing houses along the river--was money well spent...
Pascagoula was settled over the years by immigrants from France and Spain, Lebanon and Yugoslavia--but by very few slaves. In Lott's youth, as now, blacks numbered only about 18% of the area's population, and whites did not feel as threatened as they did in the black-majority counties of the Mississippi Delta. While most neighborhoods were segregated, the races mixed easily on the streets and in factories, where jobs were available to everyone...