Lott's Adventures in Gaffeland

By Michael Kinsley

If a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth (as someone once said), Senate Republican leader Trent Lott's bizarre endorsement of white racism and segregation does not qualify. An authentic gaffe is more like Lawrence Lindsey's comment that a war against Iraq could cost $200 billion, which got him fired as President Bush's top economic-policy adviser. Nobody at the White House disputed the figure--they just didn't want it brought up. This is called being off-message, and in Washington that's much worse than being, say, wrong. Lindsey's replacement, investment banker Stephen Friedman, was found to have economic beliefs not always in keeping with the Administration's message (easily summarized in two words: tax cuts). But the important thing is that he will stick to the message from now on, whatever it happens to be.

Lott's comments, by contrast, were certainly not the truth. But they may have revealed a truth. The suspicion is that they bubbled up from his id and escaped through his lips when his guard was down, thereby exposing an important and deeply distressing moral flaw in Lott himself. This process is too serious to label a gaffe. So let's call it a supergaffe. A supergaffe is when a politician says what he really thinks.

Then Washington turns into Gaffeland, and what happens next can be comic. Both kinds of gaffe--regular and supersize--set the stage for festivals of disingenuousness and outright dishonesty. In some ways, the most honest reaction to the brouhaha has been that of Lott himself. His position has been, "Oh, c'mon, I didn't mean it." And surely he didn't mean it, at least consciously. Even if he is a racist, he had no reason to want to say so. Lott must sincerely and understandably feel blindsided. Since when are the fawning remarks of some politician at another politician's birthday party taken seriously? That's cheating! An editorial in the Washington Post asks, If he didn't mean what he said, what did he mean? The answer is, he meant nothing at all. Lott, as a Senator whose intellectual integrity may fall only slightly below the median, does not place any great value on his own words. How unfair, he must be thinking, that others do.

And then there are Lott's critics. The politicians and pundits trampling one another in a scramble for the microphones in order to say how deeply offended they were at his comments, how saddened they are by the man's transgression or how urgently they wish his removal from the Senate leadership--or, if possible, from the solar system--can be divided into two categories. Call them Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats, by and large, are sincerely offended by what Lott said. But they are delighted, not saddened, that he said it. And they are utterly insincere about wanting him to be gone. Like the Republicans during the impeachment of President Clinton, they want to roast their victim in public for as long as possible. Once he goes away, so does the issue.

The Republicans, by contrast, are completely sincere about wanting Lott to be gone, but they are generally insincere about the reason. They want him to be gone for the same reason the Democrats want him to stay: the sooner he's gone, the sooner this nightmarish issue goes away. No one can doubt that Republicans are saddened by the public revelation that Lott shares the views of Strom Thurmond. Yet there are good reasons to doubt that all of them are as offended as they let on, starting with the fact that Thurmond himself has been a Republican Senator in recent centuries.

In fact the timing of the outrage, both long term and short term, raises doubts about everyone's sincerity. Daily and then hourly come new disclosures of old incidents that seem to confirm the beliefs suggested in Lott's remarks. Each new item is a nail in his coffin. But these incidents were publicly known at the time they occurred and have been no secret since. Just as Lott did, the entire Reagan Administration openly supported Bob Jones University in its claim for charitable tax status despite its rule forbidding interracial dating. There is a rarely acknowledged random element in what becomes a big news story and what does not. But moral outrage ought to aspire, at least, to some kind of consistency. The tendency in Washington is the opposite: a new moral norm (don't smoke marijuana; pay your nanny's Social Security tax; don't get misty-eyed about segregation) sweeps into town like a hurricane, knocks a couple of people down, then sweeps out and is forgotten.

The way this story sat around for several days last week before the politicians turned their blood up to boil is also a bit suspicious. Even hair-trigger moralizers like Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain were slow this time. The President's deliberations were exceptionally deliberate. On Days 5 and 6 after Lott's remarks, the White House shrugged the matter off. On Day 7, Bush declared that Lott's remarks were "offensive." It is hard to understand how anyone can take a week to take offense at a racist remark. A natural suspicion is that the President and the other politicians aren't really as offended as they pretend to be. It is equally possible that they did take offense from the beginning but suppressed it while waiting to see how the story played out. In Gaffeland, there is no penalty for changing your tune as long as you're singing the right one in the end.