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Why Lott and Barr hate Clinton
While Lott himself was first elected to Congress in the Nixon landslide of 1972, the revenge he now seeks may echo the regional divisions of a century ago, dating to the last impeachment trial of an American president -- when Andrew Johnson, defender of the white South against black Reconstruction, was impeached by radical Republicans and escaped conviction by a single vote. And although the Senate chief likes to style himself as a man of the New South, he maintains close ties to white supremacist and neo-Confederate organizations such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, the Southern Partisan magazine and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. For those who share his nostalgia for the antebellum period and the pre-civil rights era, Clinton symbolizes all that has gone wrong in America since the Civil War.
Exposure of the neo-Confederate influence among Republicans on Capitol Hill began with news stories about Bob Barr, the impeachment advocate from Cobb County, Ga., who spoke at a meeting of the Council of Conservative Citizens earlier this year. Barr denied endorsing the CCC, a direct organizational descendant of the White Citizens Councils set up across the South to resist integration during the 1950s; and the CCC leadership likewise denied that it shares the racist ideology of its predecessor. But to anyone who has given even cursory attention to the CCC's publications, that denial rings false -- and if anything, Lott's culpability is even greater than Barr's.
As Thomas Edsall reported in the Washington Post last week, Lott contributes a regular column to Citizen Informer, the CCC's newspaper, and he has posed for pictures with the group's leaders on more than one occasion. The most recent photo, published in 1997, was taken in the senator's Washington office, where he smiled broadly while standing next to the CCC's national leaders, including William D. Lord Jr. According to Edsall, Lord was formerly a "regional organizer" for the White Citizens Councils.
The CCC's affection for Lott is understandable, because the senator subscribes to the same dubious brand of Republicanism as its leaders do. Interviewed in 1984 by the Southern Partisan, a leading neo-Confederate organ, Lott explained why he believes that "the spirit of [Confederate President] Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform," and went on to deplore a national holiday devoted to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.
Not that any of this should be terribly shocking to anyone familiar with Lott's career. After immersing himself in campus politics at the University of Mississippi during the deadly riots that greeted its first black student, James Meredith, in the early '60s, Lott went to law school and then became administrative assistant to Rep. William Colmer, a fanatical segregationist Democrat. When Colmer retired, Lott switched parties and won his seat running with the Nixon-Agnew ticket in 1972. In his spare time, the former Ole Miss cheerleader joined the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a bastion of Southern reaction that features Lott in its promotional video.
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Behind all the talk of patriotism and duty, the Republican obsession with ousting President Clinton from the White House has long carried a distinct odor of vengeance, not only for the president's political success but for the lingering wound of Richard Nixon's resignation in disgrace a quarter century ago. Now, with the delivery to the Senate of articles of impeachment -- penned on traditional parchment paper -- the task of avenging old grievances falls to Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Senate Majority Leader.