Ruthless Indeed

R.W. Apple Jr.’s "Majority Report" in today's Week in Review section [majority??!!] puts some more NYT spin on the post-Lott era of Republican congressional dominance.

The major take-away from Apple’s piece is that the cat is now out of the bag – the cat being of course the unreconstructed Southern racist/segregationist component of the Republican coalition.

"The difficult question of race is back, revived and dangerous, and President Bush faces a far harder task in his campaign to demonstrate that the Republican Party is still the party of Lincoln, open to all."

Is there something in the water in Manhattan? Bush and the Republican senators just did this. Lott has long been an ineffective and mildly embarrassing Majority Leader. This was tolerated. But once Lott displayed what could be interpreted as retrograde Dixiecrat sympathies, the Bush administration moved deftly to replace him as SML. An impartial observer could only conclude one thing: there is no "race issue" in the GOP: such questions have been settled, and where the GOP stands on race has been – very publicly and at the risk of jeopardizing control of the Senate – demonstrated.

The Democrats have been looking for an issue to hang their hat on since President Bush came into town: prescription drugs, Enron, tax cuts, Iraq, etc. They have been outsmarted at every turn, left looking like the vacuous, pandering reactionaries they generally are. Finally, they were handed an issue – by a Republican leader no less, and once again the Bushies have pulled the rug out from under their feet.