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Moral outrage dictates that, whatever Trent Lott thought he meant when he said Mississippians should be "proud" of having supported Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat candidacy in 1948, there must be accountability for words so misbegotten.
That's why this morning (Wednesday, December 18th), my newspaper, the Mobile Register, ran its fourth editorial in nine days saying that Mr. Lott has a moral duty to step down as Senate Majority Leader. The Register is a very feisty, highly conservative paper that, as far as we know, was the first paper of any size in the country to demand President Clinton's resignation back in 1998. Mobile not only adjoins Lott's old congressional district, but is so close to his Pascagoula home that he uses our airport and tapes TV appearances at Mobile's television stations. The Register thus hails from Sen. Lott's geographical and philosophical backyard. From the Western border of Lott's Mississippi, two other papers whose editorials tend to lean at least slightly rightward — the Baton Rouge Advocate and the New Orleans Times-Picayune — also have called for Lott to step down as Majority Leader. And I spent part of last weekend on the Mississippi coast, where even the few staunch conservatives I spoke to (one of them my father, Haywood Hillyer III, former Republican national committeeman from Louisiana) were eager for Lott to step aside. Thoughtful conservatives here, as in the rest of the country, share a deep philosophical commitment to color-blindness under the law — combined with a Jack Kemp-like enthusiasm for market-based anti-poverty incentives that would be particularly beneficial to black Americans trapped in downtrodden neighborhoods. While rejecting racial preferences under the law, we also realize that racism still exists and still is hurtful. In the past few years I've been with a black friend when white players plucked his golfball from a fairway for sheer spite and when our lunches weren't served until after the black friend gave up and left the premises; and I've been with white friends where other people not only used racial epithets with abandon but also referred to black neighborhoods while making monkey sounds. Conservative defenders of Mr. Lott may have reason to react against "politically correct" tendencies to see racists behind every tree. But words such as Lott uttered, words that truly are racially divisive on their face, only feed those leftist tendencies to conflate benevolent conservative policy positions with the daily racism on golf courses and in restaurants that black Americans still experience. It may not be fair to Sen. Lott to define his whole career, much of it quite distinguished, by a few thoughtless comments. But politics isn't fair. Sen. Lott is no stranger to political hardball, and he ought to recognize the political reality that he now is untenable as the top senator in the land. There's no reason why he can't find another role in the Senate, perhaps using his history of patriotic leadership on defense issues to advantage as the point person on realigning congressional committees to take into account the new (if ill-conceived) Department of Homeland Security. There should be no shame, after all, in serving in a role of secondary leadership in the majority party of the upper legislative chamber of the greatest country on earth. If Sen. Lott won't recognize that reality and accept it with grace, it is incumbent on his colleagues to give him as much of a push as he needs to step aside. The original reaction of most GOP senators to Lott's idiotic remarks paid more homage to the Senate "club" than to the Senate's imperative to serve the greater good. For the good of the order, it would be nice if a southern conservative politician took a cue from conservative papers, in the south and elsewhere, and said that Lott has forfeited his claim on the Senate's top spot. But if Lott's Senate colleagues allow Lott to remain as Majority Leader, they will demonstrate that they are morally obtuse and politically moronic. — Quin Hillyer, an editorial writer and columnist for the Mobile Register, won the 2002 Carmage Walls Commentary Prize ("in recognition of courageous and constructive editorial commentary") from the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association. |
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down here on Trent Lott's Gulf Coast, a deep and profound conservatism
need not imply any racist sentiments. Here as elsewhere, moral outrage
can flourish in the conservative heart.
