The other day when Tommy Stevenson of the Tuscaloosa News promised a Sunday column on Trent Lott’s revelation of an important pact with John McCain, curious georgette and Third South (and some thousands of other foloers, I’m sure) knew just what to expect: more wind from The Helmet-Haired One, full of self-puffery but nothing much that Camp McCain wanted to hear.
And lo, TS’s Sunday column provides just what our ceegee and 3dS predicted: Lott at his self-treasuring but not exactly helpful fullest-of-it:
“When I first committed to John in January of ’06, a lot of people thought I was crazy because we had just lost [a midterm] election,” Lott told some 400 of the party faithful gathered at the Bryant Conference Center on the University of Alabama campus. “I said, ‘Okay, John, I’m going to support you’ because I thought if he could get the nomination, he would be president [and] I think he will be president.
“I said, ‘I’ve just got one thing I want to ask from you,’ and I paused for maximum effect — I wanted him to think I want to be maybe counselor, or attorney general or secretary of commerce,” Lott said at the fund-raising dinner sponsored by the Tuscaloosa County Republican Party and honoring Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions. “There was nothing he could do for me or against me or to me that I hadn’t already had done.
“So I said, ‘I just want one thing from you John. Will you let me talk to you some time before you take off on some of these wild tangents you get off on?’ And he said, ‘I probably should do that anyway — you’ve got it.’”
“So I’m giving you the word I got from John McCain: if he gets a little bit too far out of line, he owes me a call and I can come back and say, ‘John, don’t do that,’” …
Think of it, dear Alabamians: me, Trent Lott, adult supervisor (after the fact) of the most powerful human being on earth!
Lacking the wit to know that this concept could appeal only to himself, Trent blew on:
“John used to harass me because I would get earmarks — or pork barrel projects — in Mississippi,” he said. “And I would say, ‘Well, yes, John, I’m a senator from Mississippi and we’re the poorest state in the nation.’
“But we’re not anymore, that pork paid off.” …
“But you know what, in my heart I knew he was right,” he said of his pork barrel ways. ["]That’s no way to do business, we shouldn’t be doing all that earmarking — it got completely out of control.
“It got out of control with Republicans and that’s why we are being punished a little bit,” he added. “Because we forgot how we got there, what we believed in, the principles that after 30 years put us in the majority, gave us the White House, the congress, the senate, the house. And then we ran out of ideas…
“But that was an aberration, that’s not who we really are.”
Reckon he sold ‘em? Well, says here, from the crowd of 400 Lott managed to coax all of $40,000 into Jeff Sessions’ coffers. So I’m thinking many checkbooks stayed in pockets and purses that night. Of course, Sessions’ being every bit as dim as Lott might have had something to do with that, or maybe it was this:
Lott even admitted that many in the room, in a state carried by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in the Alabama GOP primary, may not be completely happy with the presumptive nominee.
“Yeah, maybe if we had a piece of paper and wrote down our preferences it might not be, in either party, McCain or [Democratic nominee Sen. Barack] Obama, but that’s what it is and we need Republicans to stop saying, ‘Oh, woe is me, I’m not excited,’” he said, exhorting local Republicans, “Well, get excited.”
No response recorded.
Freud may be alive and well….
“I talked to Charlie Black, who is [McCain's] policy director, yesterday and I told him, ‘You’ve got to liven these rallies up. John’s got to give ‘em some red meat, John’s got to get loud a little bit, tell ‘em how the cow ate the cabbage, as we say in Mississippi, shuck a little corn, get mad about it, get happy about what we can do in this country,’” Lott said in his best down-home style.”
Ya think they got a fixation on corn or something?
How did he leave out “getting the hay down where the goats can eat it”? And yes, Sir, Shaves, they like laying that corn down on the ground — but no mention of sweet pototatoes from Trent. My favorite: “[G]et mad about it, get happy about what we can do in this country.” What, please, does that mean in Tuscaloosa, Alabama? I look forward to Senator McCain’s Trent-induced loud, red-meat, how-the-cow-ate-the-cabbage Mississippi address. Will it include “tell the truth or get out of the church”? I keep thinking, in the context of these remarks: “Ain’t we fine?”
I wonder if Trent actually knows how real cows eat cabbage. Has he ever sat on a wagon loaded with corn and shucked?—before laying it on the ground, of course. However, I’ve been told that he loves sweet potatoes.