Perils of Foot-in-Mouth Disease

For some in political high places, foot-in-mouth disease causes a raging fever for a few miserable days and then passes.

For Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, the question was when -- and how -- his fate would be decided in a case that had consumed Washington’s talk show and Christmas party circuits. On Friday, after two long weeks, the case proved terminal with Lott’s announcement that he would bow out as Senate GOP leader.

He infected himself on Dec. 5 with seemingly racist birthday salutations delivered at a party for an aged fellow Southern Republican, and had struggled since then to hang on to the leadership post.

In truth, scads of public figures before Lott have made similarly insensitive remarks. So what separates casualties from survivors? Is there a political gene that enables some to apologize with dignity and chagrin while others come off as pandering fools?

The answer, experts say, is a combination of personal history, luck and timing -- none of which went the besieged senator’s way.

There are lessons to be learned from the plight of Chester Trent Lott. If you are going to make a gaffe in Washington:

* Do not confirm people’s worst suspicions about yourself.

* Never compromise your president.

* Never misspeak during a slow news week.

* Mobilize your allies.

* Apologize fast -- and with feeling.

“A full-throated apology within a couple of days of the event and we wouldn’t be talking about this. People would say it’s the holidays, forget it; but his overconfidence and arrogance kept him from doing what he needed to do,” said Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia professor and author of two books about political scandal.

Lott’s troubles began when he asserted at a 100th birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond that the country would have been better off had the South Carolina Republican been elected president in 1948.

The problem was that Thurmond was a segregationist in 1948. Lott failed to immediately recant, and when he finally did, the incident had grown its own political life, a dangerous development for a powerful man who, it turns out, has more enemies in Washington than friends.

His party’s leading conservatives called for his resignation as leader, denouncing him as “thoughtless and careless ... ineffective and clumsy.” Perhaps worse, Democrats had started to defend him: “The way his party is stabbing him in the back right now is pretty savage,” veteran Democratic Party strategist Paul Begala said before Lott stepped down Friday.

History books are filled with political bloopers, some that led to early retirement, others that faded to mere footnotes.

Among the most famous headstones in the graveyard of blown careers is that of Earl Butz. Agriculture secretary under President Ford, he made a racist remark so coarse newspapers wouldn’t print it. Ford, in the midst of a grueling reelection campaign, asked him to resign.

President Bush neither openly abandoned Lott nor defended him. In the coded language of Washington, that spelled trouble.

The debacle was proving “politically very harmful for Bush,” said Stephen Hess, a scholar of the presidency at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank in Washington. “He wants to move ahead with his program in the Senate, he’s just won a big election and instead he’s mired in this other battle.”

Whether a loose-tongued official survives his mistakes depends to some degree on the mathematics of politics: Where does he fall in the hierarchy of government and how many people did the remark offend?

Take recently retired House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), who in 1995 referred to openly gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) as “Barney Fag.” The epithet provoked a storm of headlines but no broad-based outrage, in part because the Republican base openly considers homosexuality morally repugnant. Armey emerged undamaged. (Lott, incidentally, weighed in at the time by equating homosexuals with kleptomaniacs.)

And when President Reagan’s secretary of State, Alexander M. Haig Jr., called Britain’s foreign secretary a “duplicitous bastard” in a staff meeting, he swiftly apologized and moved on unscathed. Few people cared.

But Lott’s remark was perceived as racist, a third-rail issue for a political party working hard to shed its image as civil rights obstructionist. The senator’s voting record made his mea culpa all the harder to accept: He had opposed the creation of a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, voted against the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and embraced Confederate President Jefferson Davis as some sort of soul mate.

His most recent words only served to confirm a mind-set a lot of people already suspected.

“If Trent Lott had a cadre of close friends and advisors in the civil rights community he would have gotten a great deal of feedback very fast. But he doesn’t, so he didn’t,” said Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican National Committee operative.

It wasn’t only in the civil rights community that Lott seemed to lack allies. Most Washington insiders knew Lott’s record on race and lived with it. But when it became an albatross to their party, that they could not abide.

“If the charge is racism, I don’t think he’s guilty,” Pitney said. “But if the charge is being a political burden to his party, he’s got a big problem.”

The controversy left Lott standing virtually alone, giving courage to ambitious rivals waiting in the wings.

Lott’s troubles are as much a function of timing as substance. He misspoke during a Washington news vacuum, with the march to war in a holding pattern and Congress idled by the holidays.

But all other factors aside, Lott’s single worst mistake may have been his failure to deliver a prompt and heartfelt apology. The delay gave the impression that he did not take the matter seriously, and gave the story legs.

When Lott ultimately made his fullest act of contrition, his characteristic stiffness came off first as stilted and then as desperate. While trying to establish himself as an ardent supporter of equal rights, he only succeeded in alienating his party’s conservative base by embracing affirmative action across the board in an interview on Black Entertainment Television.

“His final step was a step too far -- he went overboard,” Pitney said. “The interviewer reminded me of Ward Cleaver giving the Beaver a talking-to -- not a good image for a party leader.”

By then, there had been plenty of time for Washington’s pot of conflicting agendas to stew. Enemies looking for a reason to challenge Lott finally had one. His party didn’t need the baggage. His president didn’t want the distraction.

“He should have groveled,” Hess said. “Groveling has a very important role in this city.”