Why Lott's a Menace to His Party

By Andrew Sullivan

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 he had said. Because if he had, he would have been gone by now.

But his perseverance turns a flap into a crisis. What this episode is about is far more than another Beltway gaffe. It's quite simply about the soul of the Republican Party. For decades, since the Republicans became the repository for some white Southern resentment of the civil rights era, the G.O.P. has walked a delicate line between legitimate support for small government and strong defense of and illegitimate reliance on racial resentments. In the past five years or so, there has been a welcome and clear attempt to grapple more directly with the question of race. Figures like Ward Connerly, the black campaigner against affirmative action, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, public servants like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and a whole bevy of neoconservative thinkers have embraced a color-blind politics that makes a sincere effort to reach out to minorities. In opposition to the racial groupthink of the far left and the bigotry of the far right, this conservatism has sought to uplift individuals regardless of race or background. For these conservatives, treating all people as equal citizens regardless of race has come to mean repudiating both old-style racism and the reverse racism of affirmative action and racial quotas.

This was a critical part of George W. Bush's appeal as a candidate and a President. The President put it unequivocally last week in Philadelphia: "We will not, and we must not, rest," Bush said, "until every person of every race believes in the promise of America because they see it in their own eyes, with their own eyes, and they live it and feel it in their own lives." From the 2000 convention onward, this was a guiding social principle of compassionate conservatism.

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. He has hobnobbed with thinly veiled white-supremacist groups. It took several attempts last week before he could manage to say that segregation is immoral. Everything Lott has done and said in his career suggests he doesn't view the civil rights movement as a vital bedrock of modern America. This moral and political blindness does not preclude him from being a Senator. But it can and should preclude him from being a leader of a modern political party.

Yes, there are double standards. Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, used the phrase "white n_____s" on television recently, and he's still in office. But he isn't a leader of the Democrats. Racial slurs like Harry Belafonte's description of Colin Powell as a "house slave" have been deployed by the far left with less public outrage. Just because these statements didn't create as loud an uproar doesn't mean Lott's record isn't repulsive. Younger conservatives feel particularly strongly about this. Despite the best of motives, they are constantly assailed as closet racists for supporting Republicans and constructing a new and inclusive conservatism. Lott's survival is a direct slap in the face to those younger black, Hispanic and gay conservatives who took Bush at his word when he opened a bigger tent for the G.O.P.

Which is why it comes back to the President. I'm not one of those cynics who believe his superb speech last week was insincere. But he must now realize that his entire domestic political project is undermined by Lott's continued hold on the Republican leadership. Bush must see that Lott's refusal to resign is also a direct challenge to his presidential leadership. So must Republican Senators, who owe their new majority almost entirely to Bush. They all have a duty to save their party now--before Lott does it even more harm.