Word: lott
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...Washington Post story broke just as Lott was settling into a Key West vacation home (owned by his wife's sister and her husband, the famed trial lawyer Richard Scruggs) in which the principal connections to the outside world were a single phone line and a small television on the back porch. Back in Washington, the White House realized Lott was not going to be able to mop up his mess. President Bush, flying to Philadelphia for a speech, was agitated as he discussed Lott's comments and was determined to speak out against them. "This is going...
...Lott by then had figured he was about to go over a cliff, his cell phone his only lifeline as he dialed up more than 50 of his colleagues to apologize and explain. His Senate second in command, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, was pleading with Republican Senators to defend their leader but found few takers. Word went around that at least one Republican Senator was threatening to publicly demand Lott's resignation. The only people who seemed to see any benefit in his remaining as one of the most visible figures of the Republican Party were the Democrats, which...
...stories kept getting worse, as reporters and Lott critics dug up evidence of his long record of resistance to the civil rights movement. TIME reported on its website that in college Lott had led the fight to keep his fraternity all white, not just in Mississippi but in chapters across the U.S. In Congress he had voted against nearly every contentious civil rights measure, including some that most in his party had supported. He had filed a friend-of-the-court brief to argue for maintaining the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, despite its discriminatory policies...
Most of the case against Lott was not fresh, but it was new to a national audience that knew him, if at all, only as the pleasant-looking fellow with the hurricane-proof hair who was always drawling about some legislative gambit on the Sunday TV talk shows. For a man who has occupied leadership positions in the House and Senate for 23 years, Lott has little to show for it by way of political vision or legislative authorship. In that sense, the Thurmond flap was a defining moment for Lott--a chance to prove that he had grown...
...comments at the Thurmond party were "totally unacceptable and insensitive, and I apologize for that." He added, "I grew up in an environment that condoned policies and views that we now know were wrong and immoral, and I repudiate them. Let me be clear: segregation and racism are immoral." Lott asked for "forbearance and forgiveness as I continue to learn from my own mistakes." But once he got beyond his script and the questions started, Lott was talking about the new Pascagoula River bridge for which he had won federal funding, the Nissan auto plant he had helped attract...