Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Retaining Trent Lott as Senate Majority Leader would damage the political future of the Republican Party, according to public relations experts interviewed by Matt Stearns. Former Hill & Knowlton CEO Bob Dilenschneider suggested Lott limit the damage by giving a speech at a black university, while others predicted "a slow, agonizing, debilitating political death" as Lott's ineffective attempts to explain away his endorsement of racist politician Strom Thurmond have been met with a flurry of stories about Lott's own racist track record: his racially-inflected 1984 interview with the Southern Partisan; his long-standing association with a white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens; and his long history of support for segregation, enthusiasm for Confederate President Jefferson Davis and disrespect for Martin Luther King.