SOMEONE PLEASE STOP HIM. The damage from Trent Lott’s offensive comments 12 days ago could hardly be clearer. His support among Senate Republicans is crumbling. Even fellow GOP leaders, his strongest backers, have begun to consider ways to oust the majority leader and allow him to save face.
But judging from his remarks on Black Entertainment Television Monday night, the first stop of his Repent with Trent tour, Lott is as clueless as ever. Lott mostly reprised his utterly unconvincing answers about the nature of his comments at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party, as if the mere fact of doing so in front of a primarily black audience would make things right. Asked what he meant by “those problems” that could have been avoided by electing the segregationist Thurmond as president in 1948, Lott said, “I was talking about the problems of defense, of communism, and budget, of a government that sometimes didn’t do its job.” Now it may well be, as Lott’s defenders suggest, that despite the rather plain meaning of the words he spoke, the majority leader was not pining for a return to the days of segregation. But if Trent Lott recalls the 1948 Dixiecrat ticket and thinks about budgets and defense, it can be said that he is the only one who does so.
