Remember Lott?

11.15.06 - Posted by AsiansVote

According to the AP, Trent Lott has just been elected by his fellow Republican senators to their No. 2 leadership post. The AP mentions that Lott was ousted from leadership four years ago for "remarks considered racially insensitive," but demurely avoids providing more detail. So let's take a quick trip in the Wayback Machine. From CNN:

"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," Lott said at last week's party.

Thurmond ran as the presidential nominee of the breakaway Dixiecrat Party in the 1948 presidential race against Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey. He carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and his home state of South Carolina, of which he was governor at the time.

During the campaign, he said, "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches."

Thurmond's party ran under a platform that declared in part, "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race."

Just four years ago, Lott praised a segregationist's racist presidential campaign. And now Republican Senators choose them as one of their national leaders. Senators George Allen and Conrad Burns discovered that race-baiting didn't work in 2006. In 2008, let's see if we can't impart the same lesson to every Republican senator who voted for Lott today.

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11.15.06 | Issues , Race & Racism