Southern Partisan is where Lott was quoted explaining his feeling that "the spirit of [Confederate president] Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform" and why he opposed a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. The Ashcroft interview was just as bad. "Your magazine also helps set the record straight," he told the editors. "You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Gen. Robert E.] Lee, [Gen. Stonewall] Jackson and [Confederate president Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

But when asked about those remarks during his confirmation hearing, unbelievably Ashcroft denied knowing about the magazine's racist views, and compared it to left-wing Mother Jones -- just another media outlet to which he'd given an interview, despite opposing its underlying philosophy. And unbelievably -- of course Ashcroft was never caught praising Mother Jones for setting the record straight -- he got away with it.

Now Ashcroft is presiding over the other prong of the GOP's Southern strategy, too. His Justice Department just announced a new "Voting Integrity Initiative" to deal with voter fraud, which minority group leaders say will disproportionately hit nonwhites. Although weeding out voter fraud sounds like a bipartisan, good-government priority, The American Prospect shows how historically it's been used to discourage and intimidate poor and minority voters. Efforts to purge voter registration rolls, for instance, tend to hurt those groups, who move around more; strict proof-of-identity requirements do the same thing. A Justice Department study found African-Americans five times less likely to have photo ID than whites.

There's probably no better example of the way such efforts can hurt blacks than Florida's voter-roll scrub in 2000, in which faulty information led the state to purge 94,000 eligible voters, most of them black, who were wrongly thought to be felons. But Bush didn't ask his brother Jeb to apologize for that voting-rights debacle -- not even after it came out that the governor dragged his heels on reinstating those legal voters' rights until after his reelection last month.

GOP forces pursued similar strategies aggressively in the midterm election. Under Ralph Reed, Georgia Republicans sponsored a "fair elections task force" to monitor the polls in November. In Arkansas, Republican poll watchers were accused of intimidating voters in predominantly black precincts by photographing them and demanding identification. In Michigan Republicans stationed "spotters" at black precincts, which Democrats charged meant to intimidate black voters and suppress turnout. In Baltimore, anonymous flyers circulated in black precincts urging voters to turn out Nov. 6 -- a day late -- but to first "make sure you pay your parking tickets, motor vehicle tickets, overdue rent and most important any warrants." Just last weekend, the Louisiana Republican Party paid for political signs in black neighborhoods that read: "Mary, if you don't respect us, don't expect us," an attempt to play on complaints by some African-Americans that Sen. Mary Landrieu hadn't paid enough attention to their issues. It backfired -- blacks turned out, and Landrieu beat her GOP challenger.

But Democrats are part of the reason Republicans get away with this strategy, because too many are ambivalent about the black voters who are crucial to their base. The same weekend African-Americans were saving the party's bacon in Louisiana, keeping Landrieu in the Senate, party leaders were silent on Lott. Or worse than silent: Tom Daschle actually defended him, and it was left to the Congressional Black Caucus to raise a ruckus about Lott's remarks, until other Democrats found their spines. When it comes to race, many Democrats mirror the Republican strategy in reverse: They pander to black voters privately, but try to avoid association with them publicly. Now that Lott has apologized four times, I think it's time for Daschle to come forward and say he's sorry for jumping to his colleague's defense instead of defending his party's most loyal supporters.

Why did the Lott story have legs this time around when it didn't in 1998? Partly it's because the nation was consumed by the impeachment trial four years ago, and could only handle one national political free-for-all at a time. Impeachment was a referendum on sex and politics and whether a public figure is entitled to a private life; we couldn't handle a cataclysm about race and politics at the same time. But I think Lott's dark evasions also resonate more this time because of the nation's sneaky suspicion that there's a gulf between the Bush administration's words and deeds when it comes to race.

At the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia, Karl Rove stage-managed a new, inclusive, multi-hued Republican Party. He did it for the son of the man who employed the great race-baiter Lee Atwater, the former Strom Thurmond campaign manager who gave us Willie Horton, as if to say: This is not his father's GOP. Of course, Rove and Atwater were great friends -- Atwater ran Rove's candidacy for president of the College Republicans -- so there's never been any reason to trust that Rove wouldn't wink at using race the way Atwater did if it worked in his candidate's favor.

Now Rove is said to be behind efforts to topple Lott, believing he'll be a liability to Bush in 2004. As cynical as that is, it's a good sign for American democracy. It means Rove thinks Republicans have more to lose by pandering to white bigots than they gain, that more voters -- women, suburbanites, independents -- will be turned off by Lott's embarrassing racial rhetoric than turned on by it. In a year of bad political news, that's reason for optimism. The GOP will have to do more than dump Lott to eradicate the divisive racial politics he represents, of course, but that they're even talking about it is good news for the nation.

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