MICKEY MOUSE MACHIAVELLIANISM:

Machiavellian orchestration (Dan K. Thomasson, December 24, 2002, Washington Times)

The Senate is a tight little club, and its members are hypersensitive to heavy-handed outside pressure. Even those from opposing parties rarely say anything against one of the chosen as evident from Democratic Leader Tom Daschle's mild, defensive reaction to the Lott remarks. So Mr. Rove and his strategists realized the emphasis for Mr. Lott's stepping down really had to appear as coming from the embarrassed Republican senators themselves, particularly since Mr. Lott initially failed to see the seriousness of the situation himself and appeared determined to tough it out.

While the White House was stating publicly that Mr. Bush was not encouraging Mr. Lott to quit, the absence of any encouragement for him to stay also was missing and the official silence was devastating. Meanwhile, the message of presidential unhappiness was being delivered in a steady drumbeat to the press by "insiders" and "sources close to the situation" and "informed observers" and other traditional devices for calculated leaks.

Mr. Rove clearly understood another fact of Senate life. Most of its members are possessed with personal ambition that if tweaked just a little will take over. Lyndon Johnson once said that to be successful every president has to realize there are probably 99 members of the Senate who think they can do the job better than he can. The person the White House wanted for the job from the outset of the controversy was presidential pal Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, a "compassionate conservative" who would be unassailable on the issue of race. After all, here was a brilliantly accomplished surgeon who spent his vacations in Africa operating on the needy.

To accomplish this, Mr. Rove and company with the president's blessing collaborated with Sen. George Allen of Virginia, a Lott backer who has his own ambitions but also saw the futility of Mr. Lott's case and what his continued resistance to resigning was doing to a party whose image on civil rights issues, fairly or unfairly, already was tarnished. Mr. Frist agreed to seek the majority leader's job and Mr. Allen informed his friend that it was over.

The real sleight of hand here is that Mr. Bush has been able to avoid the blame for torpedoing Trent Lott despite the speech in Philadelphia that effectively settled the question. From then on Mr. Lott was living on borrowed time. To that extent what was most on display in this episode was the way the press often gets co-opted into the plotline of a story, as witness their willingness to keep repeating with a straight face the White House's absurd denials that the President wanted Mr. Lott out. Mr. Rove needn't be terribly crafty so long as the opponents are so obtuse. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 24, 2002 2:30 PM