Lott Eager to Rally Senate Behind House GOP Agenda

By MELISSA HEALY

Dec. 25, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — In the ornate Senate Caucus Room, members of the Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation listened politely as Thad Cochran, Mississippi’s senior senator, plodded through the details of the pending farm bill, praised the benefits to farmers of free-trade agreements and enumerated the technological advantages that make American agribusiness so effective.

As the courtly Cochran returned to his seat, junior senator Trent Lott grinned at him wickedly. Nice speech, Lott said, “but now I’m going to throw them a little red meat.”

Lott took the podium, Cochran recalls, and punched “every hot button” those home-state farmers had. He embraced school prayer. He excoriated the federal welfare system and its effect on poor mothers and their children. He exhorted Congress to lock up criminals after their third conviction and throw away the key.

“They cheered!” said Cochran, describing the February hearing scene with a kind of detached amazement. “Oh, they applauded! He entertained them, and he brought them right along.” The two Republicans, Cochran concedes, “have a different tone, a different approach, a different style.”

More than any other factor in the Senate, the tone, approach and style of Trent Lott could determine the success of the GOP’s legislative agenda next year and redefine the public perception of the gentleperson’s club that is the United States Senate.

When the new Republican-controlled Congress is called to order on Jan. 4, Lott will occupy the Senate’s second-highest leadership position, ranking only behind GOP leader Bob Dole of Kansas. Even more important in the eyes of his GOP colleagues, Lott is regarded as the one senator with perhaps the closest ties to incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the spiritual leader of the conservative crusaders who wrested control of Congress away from the Democrats.

It is Lott who could unite ideologically diverse Senate Republicans behind a Gingrich-style agenda to cut taxes, slash social spending and shrink the government. It is Lott who could dash the hopes of Democrats, as well as some Republican moderates, who would like to see Senate Republicans tone down or bottle up some of the more provocative measures passed by the House. It is Lott who could increase pressure on Dole to forge a legislative alliance with Gingrich that moves the congressional center of gravity even further to the right.

As majority leader, Dole will be dictating the Senate’s schedule and dominating its external relations. But Lott, who won the GOP race for Senate majority whip by defeating a candidate preferred by Dole, is likely to be the internal force that moves the Senate. And by his own admission, he intends to make it move in unaccustomed ways.

The Senate, Lott said in a recent interview, needs to “enter the 20th Century” and leave behind some of the go-it-alone traditions that have made each senator an island unto him or herself.

In other words, the Senate ought to act a little more like the House.

“It will require stronger leadership and greater discipline, but it also will require a little followership ,” Lott said. “More than anything else, it’s generational and stylistic. This is not 1949, it’s 1994. Can we acknowledge that?”

Such directness is vintage Lott, present and former colleagues say. His persona is a subtle mix of polish, calculation and feistiness--a combination that makes him unusually adept at reading his audiences, rousing them to action and recruiting them to serve as foot soldiers in the GOP’s political army.

Lott will need all of those skills if he is to clear the way for passage of the ambitious Republican agenda crafted by Gingrich, his friend and political comrade-in-arms. Only by motivating and disciplining the Senate’s GOP forces--and by transplanting some of the House’s energetic partisanship to the Senate--can Lott ensure that the upper chamber does not become the graveyard for the House GOP’s “contract with America.”

If Lott can accomplish that feat, it would mark a historic turnabout. The Senate, after all, is an institution long dominated by gracious and studious men like Cochran, a 14-year veteran whose seniority would have won him, in past years, the job of majority whip that went to the younger, more aggressive Lott. It is an institution in which partisanship--and party discipline--generally take a back seat to a tradition of mannered mutual respect among the chamber’s 100 barons.

All that is changing, said Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.). And the combative Lott, who served for 16 years in the House before moving to the Senate in 1988, appears to be both a symptom and an agent of that change.

“The Senate is not like the House, although it’s becoming more like the House all the time,” said Cohen, a moderate Republican who served briefly with Lott in the House. “Things are starting to get a little more polarized in the Senate, and that’s been brought about by animosities smoldering in the House for years. . . . I suppose (Lott) being a newer member is part of that.”

Lott offers no denials.

“The House needs to learn to be a little less aggressive and partisan,” he said. “And the Senate would do well to be a little more considerate of the institution as a whole and a little more aggressive. I’m not for a minute trying to make the Senate in the image of the House. I left the House. . . . But I do believe we can do better in the Senate.”

Lott’s admirers believe that the 53-year-old Southerner, a perennial list-keeper who plainly revels in the inner workings of Washington politics, is just the man for the job.

“He has a deep and penetrating understanding of the motivations that members have . . . including ambition,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a fellow conservative who joined the Senate two years before Lott.

Lott clearly has ambitions of his own, although colleagues say they appear to be confined to the Senate. Some say the job he really wants is the one about to be occupied by Dole, who, by many accounts, does not fully trust his new lieutenant. And after edging out Dole’s preferred candidate, Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), by just one vote, colleagues say they think Lott would like to win the majority leader’s job one day by acclamation.

“I think the limits of Lott’s ambitions are to be a leader in Senate who will go down in history with people like Lyndon Johnson as a man who has really affected the institution for good,” McCain said. “He wants to be remembered in history as one of the giants of the Senate.”

If he achieves that kind of stature, colleagues say, it will not be for his vision. And it will not come from the kind of naked exercise of power that distinguished Johnson. Instead, it will reflect Lott’s effectiveness at coaxing, cajoling, herding and wheedling his Republican colleagues to support a common GOP agenda.

“Newt Gingrich is the grand thinker and strategist for the Republican Party,” said Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “He provides the grand strategy. Lott is the facilitator. He’s the one who buys into the vision, but is trying to build the majorities to get the votes, to nudge his colleagues into doing the right thing.”

It is, for Lott, a familiar role. Back in the 1970s, Gingrich’s Conservative Opportunity Society was an isolated rump group of hyper-conservative misfits and outcasts within the House of Representatives. It was Lott--by then a member of the House GOP Establishment--who quietly attended many of their meetings and pleaded their case to the chamber’s minority leaders. At a time when Gingrich’s group was openly shunned by fellow Republicans, Lott’s subtle intercession won Gingrich and his causes increasing access and support.

Born in rural Grenada County, Miss., where his father farmed and his mother taught school, Lott worked his way through law school at the University of Mississippi by running the Ole Miss alumni organization. It was a position in which he made contacts that would serve him well in future campaigns.

One of Lott’s most important friends was his first employer after law school: U.S. Rep. William Colmer, a Democrat. Colmer encouraged Lott to run for his seat after he retired, and continued to support him strongly even when Lott decided to run as a Republican.

“This guy’s been making friends his whole life,” said Michael Boland, a former staff assistant to Lott in the mid-1980s, when he was serving alongside Gingrich as House minority whip. “He has among his friends people who, if he ever shared a political view in common, it was an accident. He’s genuine, and that’s a political skill with a small p. Moreover, no one will ever outwork him.”

Some colleagues offer less flattering assessments. A few say they find Lott’s chosen role as loyal lieutenant and Washington insider difficult to square with his arch-conservative, anti-Washington convictions and evident ambition.

“Even among a group of ambitious people--a group of people among whom there are few shrinking violets--Lott’s overarching ambition has been apparent from the beginning,” said a Republican senator who supported Simpson for the minority whip job. “Some are attracted by it. Some are turned off by it. Sometimes blatant, aggressive ambition succeeds, sometimes it bombs.”

Others are even more blunt.

“He’s slick. . . . “ said Bill Minor, for 40 years a syndicated columnist covering Mississippi politics in Jackson. “He sort of blithes over any real issues, looking for hot-button issues, things he knows are going to be very popular. He’s not going to be caught taking positions that are unpopular. He’s always been a smoothie.”

In the past year, Lott’s embrace of two hot-button issues--health care reform and tougher criminal sentencing--have made the Mississippian a highly visible player in Washington politics.

Last spring, the Clinton Administration’s massive health care measure had run into serious political trouble, and Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) was struggling to cobble together a compromise plan that would stand some chance of passage. Sensing an opportunity, Lott reached over to the House, plucked up a middle-of-the-road proposal authored by House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) and introduced it in the Senate. The so-called Michel-Lott bill garnered substantial interest and is expected to be one of the centerpieces of Republican health care reform efforts in 1995.

Meanwhile, Lott became a major proponent of the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” amendment that was attached to the Administration’s crime bill. The amendment sets federal sentencing rules requiring violent felons convicted for the third time to be locked up for life without possibility of parole. The proposal resonated with voters’ fears of violent crime and frustrations with a criminal-justice system perceived as ineffective.

Lott has not always chosen so well. In 1974, as the youngest member of the House Judiciary Committee, he ardently defended then-President Richard Nixon and voted against his impeachment in connection with the Watergate scandal. More recently, when he became the Senate GOP point man on Clinton Administration nominations, he concluded that Atty. Gen.-designate Zoe Baird’s hiring of an illegal nanny was not a “killer issue.” He was dead wrong, and Baird’s nomination was withdrawn.

With the 10-point “contract with America,” Lott appears to have found a whole slate of issues he can use to rally the Republican troops.

In a nod to Senate tradition, Lott says he hopes to follow a practice of “keeping them together by letting them stray.” But his actions suggest less tolerance than his words: Lott plans to create a team of assistant whips who will roam the Senate floor and make sure members don’t stray too far from the party line. The system, not coincidentally, is much like the one used to enforce party discipline in the House.

“In contrast to longtime senators, he may appear more forceful,” said incoming Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), an eight-year House veteran who has been a friend of Lott’s since 1986. But Lott’s penchant for tossing out red meat now and then is not expected to limit his ability to indoctrinate independent-minded Republicans with the finer points of “followership.”

“From a tactical point of view,” Kyl said, “it’s awful difficult to beat Trent Lott.”