The silence, though, was deafening. And on Thursday, when Virginia Sen. John Warner, one of the old bulls, gave his blessing to a challenge to Lott from Sen. Bill Frist, the end had come. This morning, Lott fell on his sword, announcing that he would step aside as the incoming majority leader, though he will not resign from his seat.
To the GOP, Frist at the helm of the Senate is a dream ending to the Lott nightmare. The Tennessean is a symbol of the New South, in stark contrast to Mississippi’s Lott, who reeks of the Old Confederacy. Frist, 50, is the golden boy of modern Southern Republican politics. President Bush loves him; he’s smart, moderate and the likely GOP presidential candidate in 2008. A former heart surgeon, he has the ability to reach way beyond traditional Republican constituencies. He travels to Africa each year to treat AIDS patients and is so good in the empathy department that he rivals Bill Clinton when it comes to feeling other people’s pain. He is also indefatigable. One morning last week, he was at the National Zoo performing cardiac exams on the gorillas and baboons.
Apparently, Frist’s challenge was a wake-up call to Lott, who had seemed strangely out of touch as his meltdown was underway. During the past two weeks, as Lott issued one apology after another, Republican senators had remained silent. Then on Wednesday, Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee said in an interview that Lott should resign his post and President Bush should intervene to help it happen. Chafee is the most liberal member of the Republican caucus in the Senate, and his words drew mixed reviews. “He’s on Pluto; nobody takes him seriously,” huffed one prominent Republican. But Chafee’s words resonated with a GOP strategist who recalled another New England moderate, James Jeffords of Vermont, who bolted the party when he felt he wasn’t being heard, handing control of the Senate to the Democrats. “The White House made the mistake of not taking one moderate seriously before, and it won’t make that mistake again,” said the strategist.
Chafee is only a freshman and lacks the stature of his father, the late John Chafee who held the seat before him, but he is a bellwether. Every day Lott dominated the news, Republicans were losing votes. House members and senators up for reelection in 2004 were already calculating Lott’s impact on their races. The White House intensified the pressure through news leaks without directly entering the fray. It was a delicate maneuver, and they handled it pretty well. Bush wanted an immaculate execution, where the deed is done and he stays clean.
Lott, meanwhile, didn’t seem to realize that the Jan. 6 vote on his leadership was a date with the executioner. He spent the week calling senators and doing a whip count on how many would support him. He needed 25 of the 51 senators in the Republican caucus, in addition to his own vote, for the 26 votes needed. But this is a secret ballot and members typically lie and then turn around and do whatever they want. The late Mo Udall of Arizona once famously said when he lost a House leadership race he expected to win that the difference between a cactus and a caucus is that in a caucus, “the pricks are on the inside.”
When Frist announced that he would run against Lott, it was as though Secretariat has entered the race. How could Lott, who’s ready for the glue factory, stick around? He had lost the confidence of the White House and squandered whatever goodwill he had among his colleagues with his relentless focus on himself without regard to the damage done to his party. He couldn’t inspire fear, or command affection, or even respect, which is how a leader gets what he wants.
Today, even with Lott out, the dominant emotion in the Senate is paranoia. Votes cast years ago are being scrutinized in a new light, along with comments made by members. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in his Thursday column reported an anecdote from 1994 that Montana Sen. Conrad Burns told during his campaign about responding to a rancher wondering what it was like to live in Washington “with all those niggers.” Burns said he told the rancher it was “a hell of a challenge.” Burns told the anecdote to a local newspaper editor and then apologized when it appeared in print. A number of Senate offices, worried that reporters or political rivals might unearth something from their boss’s past, were busy doing Lexis-Nexis searches to see what’s out there and to figure out where the next shoe might drop.
There will be life after Lott. Because Frist is such a good face for the GOP, he will wipe away much of the damage done by Lott, who will be left to wander the Senate like Banquo’s ghost. Lott has vowed to serve out his term until 2006. That’s wise on his part. Who would want to hire him as a lobbyist or put him on their board given the controversy? He should welcome the time to rehabilitate his image; he’ll need every moment.
