Word: lott
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lott wants to reach out to blacks and is not a racist, why has he addressed segregationist groups and mused about his Confederate heroes? "Part of it's just habit," says a Lott confidante. Lott has seen the "segs" as part of his constituency. But he knows now that the cost of winking at them is very high, not so much among blacks as among white moderate voters and among national G.O.P. leaders...
...Even as Lott tried to put the controversy behind him, he ensured that it would persist. He announced that he would discuss it for an hour this week on the Black Entertainment Television channel, owned by Robert Johnson, a Mississippi native who is black. Meanwhile, Democrats are debating whether to seek a resolution that would formally censure Lott, which they could introduce as soon as Congress returns to Washington...
...Lott would dearly love to avoid that sort of escalation. He said he was encouraged over the weekend by expressions of support from Senate colleagues and Mississippi constituents. It's hard to know what may have changed in Trent Lott's heart. But what's certain is that he knows how to count votes. And if he calculates that it's safe for a Southern, white Republican to forgo the old racial code words, that's a measure of progress. --With reporting by James Carney, John F. Dickerson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Jackson Baker/Oxford
From the very beginning of Trent Lott's fourth attempt to apologize, the tone was all wrong. The Senate Republican leader seemed forceful, composed, even buoyant--but not at all bowed, contrite or shaken. The words said sorry, but the attitude didn't. By the end of the press conference, Lott was actually grinning. It was as if he wasn't aware that when a major politician in 2002 needs to assure the nation that he repudiates racial segregation, the game has already been lost. It was as if he still didn't grasp the hideousness of what...
Whatever he now says, Lott's endurance as the Senate's G.O.P. leader is a direct attack on that mission. The issue is not whether Lott is a racist or a segregationist. We cannot know what is in his heart. The issue is Lott's astonishing record of racial obtuseness. This is a man who has twice uttered public statements regretting the end of Jim Crow. He voted against a federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. "Racial discrimination does not always violate public policy," he wrote in a 1981 amicus brief defending Bob Jones University's ban on interracial dating...