Word: politicians
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...associated with fringe groups, the people who really mattered to him--his Mississippi supporters and Republicans in the Senate and White House--had seldom complained about such comments in the past. "The most important thing to understand about Trent Lott is that he never left Mississippi," says a Republican politician who has worked with him for decades. "He did not grow in the sense of trying to understand the country." Lott rose in Congress by cultivating personal relationships and making his moves at the right time. Says the friend: "He's never outgrown who he is and where he comes...
...conference as evidence. "Think about the statements I made there. I stood in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and repudiated racism of all kinds and apologized for things I've said that hurt African Americans. If Mississippi hadn't changed, I couldn't have said those things. Can you imagine a Mississippi politician of 30 years ago or 20 years ago doing that? They couldn't do that...
...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 he had said. Because if he had, he would have been gone...
...gaffe is when a politician tells the truth (as someone once said), Senate Republican leader Trent Lott's bizarre endorsement of white racism and segregation does not qualify. An authentic gaffe is more like Lawrence Lindsey's comment that a war against Iraq could cost $200 billion, which got him fired as President Bush's top economic-policy adviser. Nobody at the White House disputed the figure--they just didn't want it brought up. This is called being off-message, and in Washington that's much worse than being, say, wrong. Lindsey's replacement, investment banker Stephen Friedman...
This was a fake year, a retro year, a year when new ideas were kicked to the curb like some dorky futuristic scooter. If someone came to you 10 years ago and told you that one of the biggest U.S. news stories in 2002 would be a big-time politician saying nice things about racial segregation, you would tell Future Boy to get back on his dorky scooter and go home. And if he told you that one of the year's biggest European news stories was going to be the supposed rise of anti-Semitism, you'd tell...