Television images canvassing Republican headquarters on election night showed so few black faces that a casual viewer could easily assume the GOP is a white-people’s party. Conversely, there is no Democratic Party without an energized black base, a fact of political life that too many Democrats would rather not confront. Race drove last weekend’s runoff election in Louisiana. GOP flyers distributed in black areas sought to depress turnout with the rumor, “If the weather’s bad, don’t worry, you can vote on Tuesday.” Minority voters weren’t fooled, but it wasn’t for the GOP’s lack of trying.
Senate leader Trent Lott’s birthday wish to former segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond that, if he had won the presidency in 1948, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years,” is the latest example in a long line of insults to people of color. Too bad for Democrats that Lott didn’t say what he did before Nov. 5 because the election outcome might have been different.
Lott’s claim that his comment was a “mistake of the head, not the heart” collapsed when news reports revealed that he had expressed almost the identical sentiment about Thurmond’s Dixiecrat candidacy in a campaign appearance for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Other comments will inevitably come to light. “If you’re wondering whether there’s a pattern,” says a former Republican campaign worker, “there’s a pattern.”
Most people are uncomfortable talking about race so politicians convey messages in code. Standing up for state’s rights has long been a favorite cover for racist impulses. When Lott stepped out of that polite way of speaking about race, he exposed the GOP’s double game: the lip service the party gives to reaching out to blacks and the winks and nods to whites assuring them nothing fundamental will change. With one stupid and thoughtless attempt at humor, Lott stripped away the carefully constructed facade the Bush team erected at the GOP convention in 2000 and revealed the party’s true colors. “We’re on the hook now,” says a Republican strategist, who hopes his party understands the depth of the damage and the need to do more to contain the fallout. Keeping Lott in place is tantamount to raising the Confederate flag over the Capitol. No matter how many times he apologies, he has become a visible symbol of the country’s racist past, and the ongoing hypocrisy of the Republican Party.
Lott’s remark at the Friday, Dec. 6, party for Thurmond initially drew little attention. The Washington Post played the story inside, and little was said over the weekend. Conservative columnist Bob Novak dismissed the comment on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” as “birthday-party rhetoric, for goodness sake.” He blamed the press for blowing it out of proportion and the Democrats for obsessing about race. Democratic leader Tom Daschle issued a pro-forma condemnation of what Lott said and showed no inclination to do more. It looked as though the boys-will-be-boys club would come through for Lott. But the story kept building in part because conservative Republican voices picked up the drumbeat. They have worked too hard to see their party gain majority strength to allow Lott’s words to go unchallenged and confirm the worst stereotypes about Republicans.
Lott has no reservoir of goodwill to draw upon and could find himself expendable. All it would take is a phone call from White House political mastermind Karl Rove to send the dominoes tumbling on Capitol Hill. Bush won only 5 percent of the African-American vote in 2000. Expanding that vote was considered easy until Lott single-handedly changed the dynamic. “Where the Republicans create a mess, let them fix it,” says former Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile. More than most people, Brazile, an African-American, understands the sensitivity of talking about race. She was called a racist in 2000 for her remark that “Republicans care more about taking pictures with black children than feeding them.” She called Colin Powell, among others, to apologize. But when she sees Daschle issuing a second statement lambasting Lott because his first statement didn’t satisfy his fellow Democrats, she loses patience with the purists. Keep the focus on the Republicans; don’t put your own party on trial, she says. “Democrats are not a social-service agency. We need to get back to being a political party.”
Brazile is floating an idea of recruiting favorite sons and daughters to run for president as a way of generating grass-roots excitement for Democrats. “It’s not just a black thing,” she says, although promoting local black candidates could draw support away from Al Sharpton’s likely candidacy. If successful, such a drive could accumulate up to 1,500 delegates, enough to sway the choice of a nominee and build interest in the Democratic Party. Brazile is having lunch next week with Rove, operative to operative. They’ll discuss the midterm numbers, just as they did after the 2000 election. “I like Karl. He’s smart,” says Brazile. “We talk simple arithmetic. He drinks Coke, and I drink Chardonnay.”
Thanks to Lott, those numbers could look a lot different in 2004.
