At the time there was talk of replacing him, so he did some sort of finagling end run and got to retain his position. Do you remember this? A lot of us were pretty upset at the time.
Dole redux - Senate Majority Leader Trent LottRich Lowry
WHEN Majority Leader Bob Dole resigned from the Senate last year, some twenty Clinton judicial nominees were pending confirmation. Conservative groups had feared Dole would sweep them all through in a final act of bi-partisan comity, and so breathed a sigh of relief when Trent Lott took over. But during July and August Lott pushed most of the judges through, bartering them for Democratic cooperation on the other matters. At one point later in the session Lott wanted to trade the confirmation of another batch of judges for a Republican Federal Election Commission nomination, a deal that was scotched when the FEC nominee himself told Lott it was a rotten trade.
Last year's action on judges has turned out to be a harbinger: of how Lott would be bent by the same institutional forces that shaped Bob Dole, of how his pragmatism would come to the fore as Senate Majority Leader, of his cur- rent tense relations with conservatives. Lott seems a natural as Majority Leader. Says one GOP senator: "He has the potential skills of a Lyndon Johnson." But, so far, the Majority Leader with whom Trent Lott is being com- pared most often is Bob Dole -- and not always favorably. Republicans had hoped that Lott could help the party stop its headlong retreat; instead he has hastened it.
Lott spent almost all his life climbing toward Majority Leader. He grew up in circumstances similar to Bill Clinton's, in a small town in Mississippi with an alcoholic father. Lott was an achiever from early on. In high school, he was voted most popular, most likely to succeed, and most handsome (runner-up). At Ole Miss, Lott became a cheerleader, an elected position. "Running for cheerleader was electioneering practice," one retired Ole Miss professor explained to the New York Times. "To get elected, they formed political blocs with other fraternities, cut deals, and did dorm-to-dorm precinct work."
In 1968, soon after law school, Lott moved to Washington. He became an aide to Rep. William Colmer, a conservative Democrat, and when his boss retired in 1972, won his seat as a Republican. Along with Newt Gingrich, he became part of the cadre of aggressive young Republicans in the House minority, rising to Whip in 1980. In 1988 he won a Senate seat. He chafed under Dole's cautious leadership and after the 1994 election knocked off incumbent GOP Whip Alan Simpson, setting the stage for his ascension to Majority Leader last June.
In Lott's persona Felix Unger meets Katie Couric, a neat freak with the con- tagious optimism of a cheerleader. He loves charts and lists, is always well-pressed, and has the tightly controlled hair of a newscaster. But the cheerful Lott also has a prodigious ability to be one of the guys. "Watch him on the floor," says a Senate aide. "He shakes hands, points his finger, winks, squeezes a neck -- and that's just in the first two minutes." Says another: "Lott thinks, If I can touch this person, and touch that person, I'm OK -- and I'm off to the next thing." Generally he's right. But the latest questions about Lott's leadership can't be winked away.
They are questions difficult to imagine asking a year ago. Inside the Senate, the word most associated with Lott's tenure as Majority Whip is "brilliant." He had a hound's nose for trouble spots and a tight organization that reliably delivered votes. When Lott stepped in as Majority Leader last year, he thought it was imperative that he clear away the legislative tangle he inherited, pass bills, and get his Republican senators home to campaign. "He hit the ground with a whole lot of mess and backlog," says Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.), "and did a masterful job in moving forward on things."
The flurry of legislation and quick exit are generally credited with helping Senate Republicans pick up two seats. But Lott doesn't seem to have adjusted his operating principle -- do any deal -- since last year, which is raising increasing alarm about his negotiating ability and strategic sense. "I'm a great admirer of Trent's," says former Sen. Malcolm Wallop. "I'm willing to give him yards of grace in this thing, but I'm awfully worried." Inside the Senate, there has even developed a nostalgia for Bob Dole. "I don't think he realizes there's a problem," a Senate aide says of Lott. "Senators like him, they want him to succeed, but they're disturbed."
What happened? To some extent, a Senate Majority Leader is always forced to be a conciliator. But Lott also has weaknesses that had gone unnoticed. "There seems to be no long-range planning," says one GOP aide. Like Dole, Lott keeps his own counsel. He seeks advice, but no one is sure he actually listens. (Lott fusses with his fingernails when he's bored.) And he often ignores his own staff, meaning he lacks the trusted advisor Dole had in his chief of staff, Sheila Burke. The self-reliance tends to undermine Lott's discipline.
More fundamentally, Republicans may have misread Lott. "The confusion with Trent," says a GOP insider, "is that people started with an assumption that he is Right of Right-Center, when really he is Right-Center and likes passing stuff." Dick Morris -- a former Lott consultant, who kept in close touch with him in 1995-96 while working with President Clinton -- writes in his book that Lott "is a politician first and a conservative second. He sees ideology as a guideline, not as a straitjacket, and wants to pass laws, not stand true to dogma." According to Morris, Lott's "goal in the Senate is to prove that the Republican Party can govern and pass laws."
Indeed, most of Lott's year as Majority Leader has been spent proving his bi-partisan bonafides. He gave controversial Labor Secretary Alexis Herman a pass. Then he worked to pass the Chemical Weapons Convention over the opposi- tion of critics in his own party. Opponents of the CWC fear that it will pro- vide an unverifiable seal of approval to dangerous countries like China and Iran, which then can leverage the information-sharing provisions of the treaty to get access to Western technology. This year, Lott pledged to stand with treaty opponents -- sort of.
"Trent was always careful to couch what he said in a way that left him an out," says one observer. "From the very beginning his political instincts were to end up supporting it." Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, a CWC critic, agreed to bring the treaty to the floor on a condition: that Lott oppose the CWC unless protections Helms had added -- against things like tech- nology transfer -- stayed in the treaty. In the end, they were all stripped out -- but Lott voted for the CWC and delivered the votes for its ratification anyway.
Lott got cover from a White House letter vowing to withdraw from the treaty if it becomes a threat to the United States. A carefully hedged, non-binding fig leaf, the letter was nonetheless hailed by Lott as a major breakthrough that made the Helms pro-tections unnecessary. Lott pressed the letter on fellow senators the morning of the CWC vote. Later in the day, he officially abandoned his neutral pose on the CWC and brought eight or so swing votes with him. "We felt we couldn't afford to let Lott lose," explains a GOP senator. "It would just unravel our leadership in the Senate."
"For Lott," says a GOP aide, "the CWC was never more than a bargaining chip." The Majority Leader told the Washington Post after the vote that it was now up to the President to "show similar courage against his base." Roughly a week later, a budget deal was announced, but with little quid to balance the pro quo. "If he got anything for his sellout on the CWC," says a Senate aide, "Lord knows what it is."
"None of us," says Sen. Slade Gorton (R., Wash.), who is close to Lott, "not Trent, not Domenici, not me, not any of the rest, is a great enthusiast for this agreement." But that didn't stop Lott from saying, the day the deal was announced, that "because of what we do here today, this country can look for- ward to an era of prosperity," that the budget will be "revolutionary in the individual lives of the American people," etc. A Senate aide says of the leadership, "they built a euphoria that sucked people in before they knew the details. There's nobody who's happy about this. There's nobody who doesn't think Lott was taken to the cleaners."
"It's clear to me," says budget critic Phil Gramm (R., Tex.), "that the Presi- dent was a lot more focused on policy than we were, and as a result the deal gets progressively better for them and worse for us." In early briefings to fellow Republicans, Lott seemed evasive on key policy questions. He wouldn't answer whether he had agreed to $35 billion for Clinton education credit over five years or ten. In the fluid days after the agreement, the Administration quickly established that the $35 billion was indeed for five years -- a number that cuts deep into GOP tax cuts.
The current challenge for Lott is to prevent even further erosion of GOP priorities. No sooner had he secured the pledge of the Democratic leadership to vote against all amendments that would break the budget agreement, than Tom Daschle was announcing his support of the Hatch-Kennedy amendment to add a $30 billion cigarette tax. "Lott is wearing a kick-me sign," complains one GOP aide. Lott managed to get the White House to provide half-hearted opposition to Hatch-Kennedy. "It was not an impressive performance [by the White House]," Gorton says dryly.
Lott has often been reluctant to face down Democratic challenges, partly as a matter of temperament. The orderly Lott wants the Senate to run smoothly. That means giving in to Democratic demands in order to avoid nasty spats and late-night sessions. He has been reluctant to have Republicans "second-degree" Democratic political amendments -- i.e., bump them with political amendments of their own -- for fear that the Democrats will offer their amendments again and again. It means Democrats often play pure politics unchecked. "It's as if they have a God-given right to torture us on the Senate floor," says one GOP staffer.
But Lott's deal-making and cooperation are also dictated by a larger political idea: that bi-partisan accomplishments offer the best hope for Republicans to enlarge their majorities in the House and Senate. For Lott, governance -- like his life -- is about achievement; he wants the congressional GOP to be voted the party most likely to succeed. This means a centrist politics of blurred differences of the sort advocated, in varying forms, by his two controversial consultants, Dick Morris and Frank Luntz (Lott recently has distanced himself from both).
With a number of vulnerable Democratic seats opening up in 1998 --in South Carolina, Kentucky, and Ohio among others -- the GOP may make Senate gains even running on a undistinguished, centrist program. But there are risks. As Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), head of the Senatorial Campaign Committee, has warned his colleagues, without a set of cutting partisan issues it will be difficult to motivate Republican base voters in 1998. And it's turnout that makes the crucial differences in off-year elections. Much of Lott's action this year has served either to demoralize the base of the party or, in the case of his defense of Kelly Flinn, positively to enrage it.
Senate conservatives hope recent criticism from the Right will make Lott warier of offending conservatives. It may well do the opposite. Lott recently stripped harsh critic Paul Weyrich of a privilege that made it easier for the activist, recovering from a back injury, to make it around the U.S. Capitol. Lott doesn't take criticism well. GOP operative Ed Rogers, a close Lott con- fidant, lashes out at the Majority Leader's critics. Of a recent George Will column shredding Lott's Flinn comments, Rogers says: "Where does he get off writing that article? That was written by an enemy, not a critic." Rogers refers to conservatives as "they": "They don't have an agenda, nor do they have a clear sense of reality in dealing with Bill Clinton."
Lott's Majority Leadership is still a work in progress, but early indications are that it will be a reprise of the days of Bob Dole, when a legislative tac- tician with a taste for deal-making and cool relations with the GOP's grass-roots muddled from one compromise to the next. If Lott succeeds in solidifying the GOP hold on Congress on his current model, it will be as a status-quo congressional party in the tradition of the Democrats in the 1980s. That would bring a stop to Lott's career climb. "I already think his presiden- tial hopes have been flushed down the toilet," says one GOP insider. And it would only serve to heighten the party's identity crisis. Lott's leadership apparently owes something to his Ole Miss cheer: "Hotty toddy, gosh almighty, who in the hell are we?"