Lott's a slow learner

MISSISSIPPI SENATOR Trent Lott's new memoir, ''Herding Cats: A Life in Politics" goes on sale this week, more than 2 1/2 years after he was ousted as the Senate's Republican leader. The experience, it would seem, has taught him nothing.

As Lott tells the tale, he lost his post because disloyal Senate colleagues exploited an ''innocent but thoughtless remark" he made about Strom Thurmond's segregationist presidential campaign of 1948. He fumes in particular over Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, who succeeded him as Republican leader.

''I considered Frist's power grab a personal betrayal," Lott writes in the new book, according to the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. ''I felt, and still feel, that he was one of the main manipulators of the whole scenario."

It is hardly news that some politicians have an endless capacity to blame others for their own self-inflicted wounds. But if Lott truly believes that the ''betrayal" of an ambitious colleague was what returned him to the back benches, he is more delusional than we knew.

It was in December 2002 that Lott uttered the words that led to his fall. ''I want to say this about my state," he told the guests at a 100th birthday party for Thurmond, the 1948 Dixiecrat candidate for president and longtime senator from South Carolina. ''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's remarks, reported in The Washington Post, were greeted with ''an audible gasp and general silence." With good reason. If the rest of the country had followed Mississippi's lead in 1948, the 34th president of the United States would have been an unabashed racist. ''All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army," Thurmond had declared, ''cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches, and our places of recreation and amusement." He had bolted the Democratic Party for one whose platform vowed to maintain ''the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race."

Who but a racist or a witless clod would claim more than 50 years later that America's problems were caused by integration and civil rights? Not even Thurmond, who had long since recanted his segregationist views, would have said such a thing. Perhaps Lott had meant only to flatter the old man and overdid the unctuousness. But in that case he should have retracted his statement the instant he realized that he had unwittingly endorsed Jim Crow. Instead he stonewalled for four days before feebly claiming that ''a poor choice of words" had suggested ''that I embrace the discarded policies of the past," but that ''nothing could be further from the truth."

Then there was the awkward fact that Lott had said much the same thing before. ''You know," he told the crowd at a 1980 campaign rally, after following Thurmond to the microphone, ''if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today."

If the Republican Party's conservative base had rallied behind Lott, he might have survived the storm. But it was precisely the base that was most upset by his words. Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, told The New York Times that the outrage on the right was ''a product of decades of hard work that conservatives have done on racially charged issues out of idealism and principle. To have those positions tarred, even inadvertently, with this backwardness on race is extremely distressing." Lott tried to hang on, but Republicans understood that his words, and the moral blindness they revealed, were simply intolerable in a party leader. Less than two weeks after Thurmond's party, Lott was out and Frist was chosen to replace him.

Lott has always insisted he is no bigot, and ''Herding Cats," according to Roll Call, ''includes examples of his personal and professional life that counter the allegation that he is racist." (Presumably those examples do not include Lott's ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist organization that has denounced ''miscegenation" and ''race-mixing" and highlighted ''the struggle for the survival of white people on this continent." )

What Lott really believes none of us can know for sure. But anyone who proclaims that ''all these problems over all these years" could have been averted if a segregationist had been elected president -- that America would be better off, in other words, if Mississippi's bathrooms were still marked ''white" and ''colored" and its black citizens barred from voting -- has obviously got a problem of his own. And if after all this time Lott still sees his words as ''innocent but thoughtless," his party was right to demote him.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.