A man from Mars - or from Europe - might expect
Mississippi
voters to favor progressive taxation and generous
social programs.
After all, the state benefits immensely from
the legacy of Franklin
Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson: it doesn't pay
a lot of federal taxes
because it has the lowest per-capita income in
the nation, and it does
receive a lot of aid. Unlike, say, New Jersey,
which pays far more
into the U.S. Treasury than it gets in return,
Mississippi is a major
net recipient of federal funds.
But Mississippi is, in fact, the home of Trent
Lott - a leader of a party
determined to roll back as much as it can of
the Great Society, perhaps
even the New Deal. Why do Mississippi and its
neighbors support
politicians whose economic policies seemingly
run counter to their interests?
Do I really need to answer that?
Fifty years ago the politics of race in America
weren't at all disguised.
Jim Crow laws both impoverished and disenfranchised
Southern blacks;
Southern whites voted for politicians who promised
to keep things that way.
The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act
ended overt discrimination.
Yet race remains a major factor in our politics.
Indeed, this year efforts to suppress nonwhite
votes were remarkably blatant.
There were those leaflets distributed in black
areas of Maryland, telling people
they couldn't vote unless they paid back rent;
there was the fuss over alleged
ballot fraud in South Dakota, clearly aimed at
suppressing Native American votes.
Topping it off was last Saturday's election in
Louisiana, in which the Republican
Party hired black youths to hold signs urging
their neighbors not to vote for
Mary Landrieu.
Still, nobody now misses the days of overt racial discrimination. Or do they?
Last week, at Strom Thurmond's 100th-birthday
party, Mr. Lott recalled
Mr. Thurmond's 1948 race for the presidency.
"I want to say this about
my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president,
we voted for him.
We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country
had followed our lead,
we wouldn't have had all these problems over
all these years, either."
What, exactly, did Mr. Lott mean by "all these
problems"? Mr. Thurmond
ran a one-issue campaign: "We stand for the segregation
of the races and
the racial integrity of each race," declared
his platform.
Is it possible that a major modern political figure
has sympathy for such views?
After all, the Bush administration includes figures
like Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice; some of Mr. Lott's best friends
. . . Yet during the 1990's
he was extensively involved with the Council
of Conservative Citizens - a
descendant of the White Citizens Council - telling
them at one point that they
"stand for the right principles and the right
philosophy." When this came to
light in 1998, Mr. Lott declared himself ignorant
of the group's aims. Was he
also ignorant of the aims of the 1948 Thurmond
campaign? Or was he just,
in the excitement of the moment, blurting out
his real views?
At first the "liberal media," which went into
a frenzy over political statements
at Paul Wellstone's funeral, largely ignored
this story. To take the most
spectacular demonstration of priorities, last
week CNN's "Inside Politics"
found time to cover Matt Drudge's unconfirmed
(and untrue) allegations
about the price of John Kerry's haircuts. "Just
two days after moving closer
to a presidential race, John Kerry already is
in denial mode," intoned the host.
But when the program interviewed Mr. Lott the
day after the Thurmond event,
his apparent nostalgia for segregation never
came up.
Now Mr. Lott has apologized for a "poor choice
of words." But choice of
words had nothing to do with it. What he did,
quite clearly, was offer a
retroactive endorsement of a frankly racist campaign.
And yes, there are political implications. In
the midterm elections, Democratic
candidates carefully avoided doing anything to
mobilize the black vote, fearing
that this would just encourage turnout by rural
whites. But the rural whites
turned out anyway, while blacks didn't. In Louisiana,
black turnout - the result
of a determined get-out-the-vote operation, perhaps
helped by Mr. Lott's
remarks - was the key to Ms. Landrieu's unexpected
victory.
Might I suggest that this tells us something?