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Republican Victory 
A nation in troubled times hands the G.O.P its missing mandate
11/18/2002 |
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Ashcroft
Every liberal interest group opposed Bush's nominee for Attorney General
11/22/2001 |
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That's a big problem for him and for his party. When Lott utters the word visionary or intellectual, he usually does so through a curled lip.
He is admired not as an author of important legislation but rather as an
inside player—someone who can forge just the right compromise to get 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 he never left Mississippi," says a Republican politician who has worked with him for decades. "He did not grow in the sense of trying to understand the country." Lott rose in Congress by cultivating personal relationships and making his moves at the right time. Says the friend: "He's never outgrown who he is and where he comes from."
But that's not entirely fair—not fair, that is, to Mississippi. There are still Confederate souvenirs in many curio shops, but most of the state has moved into the 21st century with an entrepreneurial zeal. You can see blacks and whites eating together, shopping together and studying together to a greater extent than in many northern cities and suburbs.
And as Lott pointed out at his press conference, Mississippi boasts more
black elected officials—897 as of July—than any other state. A day after making his hometown apology last week, Lott told Time in an
interview that he has been transformed along with his state. "I have changed. People in Mississippi have changed. You grow up in one kind of society and know a certain kind of people and their views, and then as
you mature, you meet other kinds of people." He pointed to his press conference as evidence. "Think about the statements I made there. I stood in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and repudiated racism of all kinds and apologized for things I've said that hurt African Americans. If Mississippi hadn't changed, I couldn't have said those things. Can you imagine a Mississippi politician of 30 years ago or 20 years ago doing that? They couldn't do that."
Most of those who know him best, foes as well as friends, say they don't consider Lott a racist in the sense of someone who hates blacks and plots to hold them down. His brother-in-law Scruggs, a longtime civil rights proponent and major financial contributor to Democratic politicians, says, "Trent and I disagree about almost everything in term of politics. But he's a fair-minded man who I've known well 32 years, and I've never seen anything remotely suggesting racial animus in him." Rather, friends say, Lott has believed—at least until last week—that government has no business forcing one group of people to associate with another, nor should it compensate anyone for past injustices. He is convinced, as he emphasized at his press conference last week, that he is living proof of the opportunity America offers to those of humble origins. His close friend, Senator John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat, says, "Trent thinks that if he could make it, anybody can."
To understand that, it helps to look at the rock bottom he came from. Chester Trent Lott was born in October 1941 in the north-central Mississippi hill town of Grenada, 246 miles from Pascagoula—and a world away, economically and socially. He was, from the start, considered a "miracle" boy. He was born six years after his parents began trying to conceive a child. They were never able to have another. Lott's first name, like his father's, came from the county in South Carolina where the Lotts first settled after emigrating from England, making their way by the early 1800s to Mississippi. Iona Lott, 89, recalls that she chose her son's middle name from a radio show that she enjoyed, The Romance of Helen Trent.
At his press conference last week, Lott emphasized his roots as the son of a sharecropper, one who dropped out of school in the ninth grade and
farmed cotton on another man's land in return for a share of the harvest. But the land was hilly and so poor that, as locals put it, you couldn't grow anything on it but old. The Lott family didn't have an indoor toilet or bathtub until Trent was 10, but they had their priorities
straight, as far as he was concerned; he had a pony and a .22 rifle, which he used mainly to shoot snakes. And he was taught to share. "People used to say that an only child would be spoiled and selfish," Iona recalls, "and I was determined that he wouldn't be that way."
Trent eagerly absorbed an interest in politics from his grandfathers. His mother's father, a large man with a rich bass singing voice, served
as a justice of the peace, sported a handlebar mustache and carried a .38 pistol in a shoulder holster that Lott prizes. His paternal grandfather
was a county supervisor. Young Trent loved sitting under the edge of the
porch listening to the men talking about campaign tactics and patronage.
(Decades later, when he moved from the House leadership to become a
junior Senator, Lott said, "I felt like I'd been sent back under the porch
again.")
By the time Trent was ready to start the seventh grade, his family had moved to Pascagoula, where his father got a job as a pipe fitter in the shipyard. Trent was too small for football, so he played tuba in the band. He had such a space between his front teeth that he was nicknamed "Gap." But he was smart and friendly, discreetly helping classmates with homework and lavishing attention on kids like himself who weren't athletic or attractive. "And you know what?" he once told TIME. "Turns out we were the majority."
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