http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheH...42005/lott.html
Lott says senators can't win 2008 presidential nomination
By Geoff Earle


Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), one of the most seasoned political observers in Congress, says that even his most ambitious colleagues — including Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) — don’t have the right stuff to win the White House.

The deposed former majority leader said he doesn’t think anyone now serving in the Senate could win the nation’s highest office, even though nearly a dozen senators are considering running for president in 2008.

“I don’t think any senator can win the nomination,” Lott told The Hill in a wide-ranging luncheon interview. “If they get the nomination, they won’t be elected president.” In fact, he said the only way a senator could be elected president is if both parties nominate a senator.

“I don’t think senators make good candidates, actually, because of what we do. If you’re in the Senate for 10 or 15 years, there’s a good chance you’ve voted on both sides of every issue” — something that can be exploited in campaign television ads, as it was to the detriment of the Democrats’ 2004 candidate, Sen. John Kerry, Lott said.

Lott made his comments at a time when Frist and Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), and others are considering presidential bids. He said the nominee is likely to be a current or former governor or big-city mayor. He mentioned Gov. Mitt Romney (Mass.) and even Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour as possible Republican nominees.

Meanwhile, Lott offered his unwavering support for embattled House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), at a time when other Republicans have voiced concerns about his leadership and ability to lead the GOP conference.

“I’ve been willing to speak up on some things that others might not want to get into,” Lott said, describing his role as a DeLay defender.

Lott knows what it’s like to be the subject of a media storm, having been forced to step down before his presumed election as majority leader in December 2001, after making controversial comments at the late Sen. Strom Thurmond’s (R-S.C.) 100th birthday party.

Lott said he hasn’t called DeLay since DeLay’s troubles became daily front-page material for newspapers. But he observed, “If something is repeated often enough … people get jumpy. Politicians are a very nervous bunch sometimes.”
He noted that during his own unhappy experience, “I apologized repeatedly, and every time I did it, it kept the story alive and made the situation worse.” He said that, in DeLay’s case, “The best strategy is to go at it aggressively, frontally.”
Lott called the charges against DeLay “rehashed” while dismissing press reports about DeLay’s foreign travel and his use of campaign funds to employ his wife and daughter for a number of years.

“It’s not against the rules,” he said. “It’s not illegal. Lots of people do it. Does it look bad? Yeah.”
Lott — who himself traveled to Hawaii with a congressional delegation that included DeLay — defended the benefits of congressional travel. He said his trip to Hawaii was one of the most beneficial he’s taken, and he referred to multiple meetings he held there on airline safety and Commerce Committee maters. Lott chairs the Aviation Subcommittee on Commerce.

Asked about the so-called “nuclear option” on judicial filibusters, Lott said, “I’m really worried. This is a cliché, but I’ll say it anyway. We’re on the verge of going from the politics of obstruction to the politics of destruction.”

He said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is “finding his sea legs” but criticized him as an obstructionist. “If we take an action on the rules, they’re going to disrupt the Senate. I call that destructionism.”
Declaring that various senators are floating compromise plans to avoid a showdown, Lott said he had the impression that Reid could not live with a compromise proposal he worked out with Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).

Lott considers himself a party loyalist, even though he has strayed from party leaders on several high-profile issues. He called his vote last year for a new Medicare prescription-drug benefit one of the two worst votes of his career (the other was his vote for the landmark 1986 tax bill).

In the last election cycle, Lott used his own leadership PAC to aid other Republicans. His relationship with Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), who last headed the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has been strained. But Lott said he couldn’t refuse requests from the new chairwoman, Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.). “You cannot tell Elizabeth Dole no.”

Lott, who chairs the Rules Committee, explained that he postponed a campaign-finance hearing on so-called 527 organizations as a courtesy to ranking member Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). Lott said that if Congress didn’t act to close a loophole dealing with spending by outside groups it would be a huge embarrassment.

Lott, who has been raising his media profile in recent weeks, appeared to tamp down speculation that he might seek a return to leadership. (GOP Whip Sen. Mitch McConnell will run for Frist’s job when Frist most likely retires in 2006, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who will run for whip, is in a tight race.) Lott called the whip’s job “the best job in town” but said he has no intentions of running for it.

Lott also implicitly criticized the White House for not working more closely with Congress. He said there hasn’t been as much “communication back and forth” between Congress and the White House as there used to be. Referring to the White House staff on the Hill, he said, “They can only be as effective as George Bush and Dick Cheney allow them to be.”