Peak of conservativism

For one time, let us take Bob Novak seriously. (Despite easy ridicule and nomination for the Misinformer of the year title.) When he talks about conservative problems, he may be trustworthy. He writes in the last column:

Control of Senate may hinge on Lott

December 26, 2005

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Trent Lott within the next week plans to decide between seeking a fourth term in the U.S. Senate from Mississippi or retiring from public life. That could determine whether Republicans keep control of the Senate in next year’s elections. For the longer range, Lott’s retirement and replacement could signal that Southern political realignment has peaked and now is receding.

Is it really so bad for the cons that their well being is dependant on retirement of a single Senator? Will we see the end of “moralize and moralize, scare and scare, elect and elect” conservativism soon?

Repubs seem to be desperate to keep Lott in the seat.

Mississippi, one of the reddest of the red Republican states, has not even been on the game board of the Washington analysis forecasting the 2006 Senate outcome. But in Mississippi, prominent Republicans are worried sick. They believe Lott will probably retire. If so, they expect the new senator will be a Democrat, former state Attorney General Mike Moore. Republican politicians in Mississippi believe Rep. Chip Pickering, the likely Republican nominee if Lott does not run, cannot defeat Moore.

Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman pleaded with Lott last week to run again. The senator was as blunt with this emissary from President Bush as he was with me. “Where is our vision and our agenda?” he asked. The malaise afflicting the Bush administration not only threatens a Senate seat in Mississippi but impacts Lott’s decision whether to retire.

Where is the vision and the agenda?! Remind me who told that conservatives are so full of ideas and vision… The corrupt corporate lobby is probably all the vision GOP has.

And then there are classical GOP dirty combinations that need to be rectified for electoral occasions:

A Bush entreaty now to Lott is ironic. Lott was driven out of the Senate majority leader’s chair after the 2002 elections when the president refused to defend him from calumnies that a harmless jocular remark on the late Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday was racist in nature. Lott’s recently published memoir, Herding Cats, reveals he was deeply hurt by Bush’s nonsupport.

Now Bush needs a ‘fantastic new house’ out of these rubbles…

But this is hardly a reason for Lott to leave conservative fellas in need. Rather seriously, his ‘personal financial condition has deteriorated’ since Hurricane Katrina.

“The hurricane is what has made this decision difficult for me,” Lott told me. On the one hand, “the performance by the administration has been poor and the Congress has not been a lot better.” […]

Lott wonders what his senatorial role would be beginning his fourth term at age 65 without a leadership position or significant committee chairmanship. Sen. John McCain has urged Lott to return as leader of Senate Republicans (succeeding Bill Frist, who is leaving the Senate). But that would require an aggressive campaign against Majority Whip Mitch McConnell that Lott is not inclined to pursue.

Meanwhile, ‘Mississippi Republicans are anxious‘… Bob “Novakula” says that ‘the bedrock of [conservative] national election victories’ may be eroding. One of the things is

[The] performance by the Republican-controlled national government in coping with Katrina is no asset for Republican candidates in Mississippi.

Perhaps 2005 was a dramatic year for the Buckley-Reagan-Bushies line of conservativism, after all.

[Crossposted at Daily Kos.]