Lott Rejoins Senate Leadership – washingtonpost.com
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 16, 2006; Page A04

Four years after racially impolitic remarks cost him the Senate’s top post, Sen. Trent Lott (Miss.) rejoined Congress’s leadership ranks yesterday when his Republican colleagues turned to the veteran insider and skilled vote-counter to help them plot their return to majority status. …

Lott’s feat ranks among the more impressive political comebacks of recent times, just as his fall from grace in December 2002 was spectacular and painful. At a 100th-birthday party for then-Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), Lott said the nation “wouldn’t have had all these problems” if Thurmond had been elected president in 1948. Thurmond had run on a segregationist platform as a Dixiecrat that year, and critics denounced the remarks as racist.

Lott said he was simply flattering an old man. But Bush administration supporters and other Republicans helped engineer his ouster just as he was about to become Senate majority leader again after the 2002 midterm elections, replacing him with Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). …

Referring to Lott’s Thurmond comments, [Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), a Lott supporter,] said that Americans believe in redemption. “It’s one of those things that happened fairly long ago,” he said, “and people have moved on.”[mjh: 2002!?]

Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, was less forgiving. “For many African Americans the sting of Trent Lott’s hurtful words are unlikely to expire anytime soon,” he said in a written statement. “However, his Republican colleagues have given him a second chance to address many of the glaring disparities that impact poor people, particularly African Americans, that he and his party have ignored for so long.”