Word: lott
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...time G.O.P. senators met last week to elect a replacement for Bob Dole as majority leader, the result was a foregone conclusion. Which is exactly how Trent Lott had planned it. After Dole's surprise announcement in May that he would resign from Congress, the second-term Senator from Mississippi with made-for-TV hair needed just one day of lobbying his colleagues to be confident of victory. "I work fast," said Lott, who also talks fast, after he swamped fellow Mississippian Thad Cochran by a vote of 44 to 8. "I probably talked to 40 Senators within 24 hours...
...Pascagoula shipyard worker, Lott, 54, has served as his party's whip, or top vote counter, for 10 of the past 15 years, first in the House and then in the Senate. His victory last week marked the triumph in the usually sober Senate of the breed of young, brash and very conservative Republican that took over the House when Newt Gingrich swept the G.O.P. to power in 1994. Lott is a supply-side tax cutter and a fervent deregulator, though his enthusiasm for deficit reduction withers when it comes to Pentagon pork, which he adroitly delivers to his home...
...Lott actually began his career as a conservative Democrat, serving as a top aide to Representative William Colmer, a segregationist, before switching to the G.O.P. to run for Colmer's seat when the boss retired in 1972. Cashing in on his college contacts from Ole Miss, where he was head cheerleader, Lott won with 55% of the vote and never looked back. In 1988 he became only the second G.O.P. Senator from his state since Reconstruction and soon leapfrogged over far more senior Republicans onto the top rungs of the leadership ladder. After the Republican sweep of 1994, he even...
...Lott's triumph consolidates a rightward and Southerly turn among the Senate leadership, which includes majority whip Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Cochran as chairman of the G.O.P. conference committee, Florida's Connie Mack as its secretary and Idaho's Larry Craig, Public Enemy No. 1 for gun-control supporters and environmentalists, as chairman of the G.O.P. policy committee. Phil Gramm of Texas happily predicts "a more aggressive Senate...
...Lott won the majority leader's post with the support of some G.O.P. moderates like Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Olympia Snowe of Maine, who believe he is a closet dealmaker. For instance, he pushed a compromise on the telecommunications bill earlier this year that, perhaps not incidentally, benefited a Mississippi company. Lott is a longtime friend of Bill Clinton's ambidextrous political consultant Dick Morris, who advised Lott in both his Senate races and frequently conferred with the Senator during last year's budget fireworks...