WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 (UPI) -- As bruised and bloodied Democrats regather for the new political battles of 2003, they would do well to recall the Trent Lott affair that proved the political epilogue to the campaign of 2002.
For one of its most important ones has been entirely overlooked. There was no Republican landslide on Nov. 5 in the congressional elections. The United States of America is still a 51-49 nation.
Of course, President George W. Bush did indeed win important, even historic victories on Nov. 5, as we recorded at the time in a United Press International analysis. He became the first Republican president in literally half a century to enjoy control of both the House of Representatives and Senate at the same time. He was the first first-term president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to increase his majority in the House in the midterm elections.
His party's majority in the House is a significant one and the national vote favored the Republicans over the Democrats by quite a bit more than 51-49. He even made significant inroads into the Hispanic vote in the very states he wanted to -- giant New York, Florida and Texas -- three out of the four biggest in the Electoral College. His personal campaigning coattails clearly proved a decisive factor in most of the 23 states in which he campaigned.
But the Louisiana Senate election run-off did not tilt Republican as almost everyone expected after Nov. 5. An unexpectedly heavy black turnout and other local factors working for Mary Landrieu won her the seat and kept the Republican Senate majority at only 51-49 after all. And then came Lott.
When the president of the United States' own brother and his secretary of state both came out in public to blast Lott following his outrageous remarks at outgoing South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday, then there was no doubt left that the president himself wanted that man gone. And the president's own robust and forthright condemnation of Lott's comments -- quickly shown to be part of a long-established ugly pattern and no mere slip of the tongue -- made that clear too.
But the last thing that Bush, his chief of staff Andrew Card and his top political strategist Karl Rove wanted was for Lott to actually leave the Senate. And, of course, they got their way. The pressure on Lott was calibrated to squeeze him out of the high profile Senate majority leader's slot and clear the way for Bush's bosom buddy, Bill Frist of Tennessee, to take it over instead. But Bush certainly did not want Lott out of the Senate itself. No way, Jose.
That was because if Lott quickly resigned, there would have to be a special election to replace him. Then, fired-up Mississippi black voters, who were perfectly happy to sit at home before while he delivered the pork barrels of federal investment and big business to their state, might well turn out in droves to kick out his would-be GOP successor. After all, that has just happened in neighboring Louisiana.
But even worse, if a truly ticked-off Lott had waited just a while and then resigned, the workings of election law in his home state would have allowed its governor to appoint the next senator, and that governor is a Democrat.
All of a sudden, Bush's dazzling victory of Nov. 5 would have been reduced to the same wafer-thin majority it was for the first five months of his presidency -- until Northeast liberal Jim Jeffords of Vermont bolted to become an independent, which he still is.
With Landrieu winning in Louisiana and the specter of Lott leaving hovering over neighboring Mississippi, the Senate would have been back to a 50-49-1 balance. But Jeffords, having burned his bridges, looks highly unlikely to ever return to the GOP fold. Instead, the truly horrible and humiliating potential danger facing the Republicans would have been history repeating itself.
For Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island has been frozen out over the years and treated as a political pariah arguably a lot more than the gentlemanly, singing Jeffords ever was. And it was noticeable that he was one of the first voices on the GOP side of the Senate floor to call -- eagerly -- for Lott's replacement.
To coin a cliché: What does this mean? It means that we are still living in a 51-49 nation with all that this implies.
As UPI's late, great political correspondent Jim Chapin liked to point out, dominant coalitions in American politics have to embrace the center, but the Republican Party, far more even than after Ronald Reagan's historic 1980 victory, is dominated by a far narrower conservative heartland coalition based on the religious right. Frist, far more than Lott, is in the heart of that coalition, as is the president himself. Two very important elements of the Reagan coalition -- a strong majority of California voters and the libertarians of the West, are increasingly alienated from the current masters of the GOP.
Bush and Rove know that although they are making significant progress in wooing Hispanic voters, they have made none at all in wooing black Americans, despite appointing the first-ever black secretary of state and only the second-ever black national security adviser. But in the midterm elections this did not matter because the Republicans were able to maximize their own relatively narrow base, with large numbers of rural whites and Moral Majority/Religious Right Christians turning out for them. At the same time, general black turnout was low, aided in a few key state elections like Maryland with having black candidates not heading the state ticket, but boosting it as lieutenant-governor running mates.
The great danger of Lott's motor mouth embarrassment was never that he would wreck Bush's efforts to woo black voters. That drive had failed entirely anyway. The dangers were more subtle and profound.
First, that Lott's 21st century enthusiasm for Thurmond as the champion of racist segregation in the 1948 presidential election would energize black voters to turn out in large numbers to beat the GOP. And Landrieu's Louisiana run-off victory, though also attributable to other factors, underlined those fears. Second, that his comments would disgust large numbers of centrist, middle-class white voters who like Bush and his general policies but who are appalled by overt racism or evidence of hypocritical double standards on such matters.
So Lott had to go. But he could not be allowed to go too far. For Louisiana proved that with fired-up black turnout, the GOP ruling national coalition is still vulnerable, even in the heart of the Deep South. And losing a Senate seat in Mississippi too would put Bush back where he was in the first five months of his presidency -- in the hands of a single, liberal -- or as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher might have put it, "wet" -- Northeastern Republican senator. Bush, who appears to have loathed his years at Harvard and Yale in the Northeast, could not have been stuck with a more bitter irony.
As things have worked out, Bush and Rove have shown their political acumen yet again. A clearly disgruntled Lott has stepped down as majority leader but is soldiering on in the Senate. Even so, thanks to Landrieu's Louisiana upset, the GOP's cherished and regained new Senate majority is still only 51-49. In other words, for the next two years, the president and his party still need those pesky, ever-barking Northeast GOP liberals even when they cannot bring themselves to throw them a single bone.
That is the real meaning of a "51-49 nation." That is the humiliating vulnerability that Lott exposed his president to, even right after a historic triumph. This is no lasting new coalition for the ages yet, such as Rove has predicted and so many pundits have thoughtlessly echoed him on.
Still 51-49 is a knife edge; 51-49 can be taken.
