Word: thurmondator
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...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 and changed and was fit to be a national leader...
...flew from Key West to his home in the shipbuilding and shrimping town of Pascagoula on Mississippi's Gulf Coast and opened a news conference by saying his 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...
...someone else's bill passed. That's one reason Lott's extensive public statements and voting record on civil rights matters did not get much national attention until last week. It also helps explain why he was so slow to address the controversy over his comments on Thurmond. Except for brief flare-ups when his name was 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...
...public policy." The court sided against Lott and the school. In 1982 Lott voted against extension of the Voting Rights Act, but it passed into law. In 1983, he voted against the designation of a national holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr.--another racial-reconciliation measure favored by Thurmond. At his press conference last Friday, Lott emphasized that he objected to the cost of the holiday--about $325 million, by his reckoning--and added that he had worked to place a bust of King in the U.S. Capitol. Lott's open sentimentality about the Confederacy has continued unabated...
...reason. They want him to be gone for the same reason the Democrats want him to stay: the sooner he's gone, the sooner this nightmarish issue goes away. No one can doubt that Republicans are saddened by the public revelation that Lott shares the views of Strom Thurmond. Yet there are good reasons to doubt that all of them are as offended as they let on, starting with the fact that Thurmond himself has been a Republican Senator in recent centuries...