Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Jill Nelson, Todd Gitlin and others react to the Senate majority leader's resignation and the apparent ascension of Sen. Bill Frist.
Dec 21, 2002 | Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee
Sen. Lott has made the right decision. But his resignation as majority leader should signal the beginning of the Republican Party's work on race, not the end.
There were many disgraceful incidents of minority voter intimidation in the '02 elections, particularly in the Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and New Jersey Senate campaigns. It is disturbing that the senator who ran these races as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. Bill Frist, is now a leading candidate for Senate majority leader.
What did Sen. Frist know about fliers distributed in Louisiana's African-American communities encouraging voters to cast their ballot "on Tuesday, December 10th" -- five days after the Dec. 5 runoff? Did the NRSC direct the Louisiana Republican Party to pay African-American youth $75 to hold signs in black neighborhoods that read: "Mary, if you don't respect us, don't expect us?" Was it part of the NRSC's ground game to have paid employees of Sen. Tim Hutchinson, D-Ark., intimidate African-American voters at early-voting polling locations?
Who leads the Republican Party is ultimately a question for President Bush and the Senate Republicans. However, I would strongly encourage the president and Republican senators to insist that Sen. Frist give a full accounting of these voter intimidation incidents before the election is held for Senate majority leader.
If the Republican Party is sincere in wanting to reconcile its poor record on race, it's not enough to get rid of Trent Lott. The time has come for the Republican Party to reconcile its empty rhetoric on race with its troubling record of civil rights suppression and support for economic and social policies that are harmful to African-American families.
Sen. Frist should start this effort now with a full accounting of the voter intimidation incidents that happened on his watch.
Jill Nelson, MSNBC columnist
Trent Lott is simply the latest sacrificial lamb to American's denial of its racist and segregationist past and present. Now his cronies in the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, the House and the Bush administration, can declare the evil segregationist in their midst gone and return to business as usual.
Lott's sin wasn't that he yearned for the good old days of segregation and Jim Crow, it was that he said so in public and broke the covenant. Yet it's important not to forget that Lott has been who he is for a long time, and there was plenty of equally damning information -- both his public comments and his votes in the Senate -- in the public record long before Strom's 100th birthday party.
I would have preferred for him to remain majority leader, one who would have been under the bright light of public and media scrutiny because of his recent events. That light justly would have also illuminated not only his views and actions, but those of his colleagues, too.
His stepping down as majority leader signals the return of the cover of darkness.
Conservative columnist David Horowitz
The resignation of Trent Lott is a credit to the man that may yet rescue him from his final disgrace. It is a gesture of respect for his party and his president and for the cause they represent. Even more importantly, it opens the door of opportunity for the Republican Party to take a leadership role in shaping the American future.
In the year of the millennium, George Bush launched a presidential campaign to change the American political landscape. He reclaimed the heritage of his party as the party of Lincoln. He proclaimed that Republicans would leave no child behind; he denounced the liberal bigotry of low expectations for Americans whom Democratic policies -- most particularly destructive welfarism and racial preferences -- were consigning to permanent second-class status. By appointing minorities to 45 percent of his top administration posts (twice that of Clinton) he proved that he would make good on his words if given the chance.
Now, with the resignation of Trent Lott, the Republican congressional party has itself entered the future the president promised. With Lott's resignation, Republicans can get on to the task of pointing out the obvious (but still invisible) truth about the political battle in this country. The Democratic Party is the party of racial preferences and race-baiting; it is the party that rules America's inner cities and has done so for 50 years. Democrats control 100 percent of the city councils and school boards that shape the destinies of the poor and minorities in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, St. Louis, and every other blighted urban big city in America. Everything that is wrong with the inner cities of America that policy can affect, Democrats are responsible for. Now the decks are cleared for Republicans to begin pointing this out, to begin the task of winning the necessary hearts and minds, and eventually to lead poor people in this country who are often minorities through the portals of the American dream.
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