WASHINGTON--Republicans on Sunday sought to portray racially charged remarks attributed to U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (Dem., Nev.), the Senate majority leader, in a new book as similar to comments made in 2002 by U.S. Sen. Trent Lott (Rep., Miss.), the Republican leader who eventually was forced to resign.Democrats rejected that comparison and continued to close ranks behind Mr. Reid for comments he made suggesting that Barack Obama could become the first African-American president because he was “light-skinned” and because he did not speak with a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
They said the circumstances surrounding Mr. Reid and Mr. Lott were not parallel.
Republicans , however, pressed the issue, with some even calling for Mr. Reid’s resignation.
“There’s a big double standard,” the Republican national chairman, Michael Steele, said in an interview on “Meet the Press” on NBC.
Mr. Steele, along with U.S. Sens. Jon Kyl of Arizona and John Cornyn of Texas, suggested that Mr. Reid should resign over the remarks.
“What’s interesting here is when Democrats get caught saying racist things, an apology is enough,” Mr. Steele said, “If that had been Mitch McConnell saying that about an African-American candidate for president of the United States,” Democrats would be “screaming for his head, very much as if they were with Trent Lott.”
Mr. McConnell is the Senate minority leader.
In 2002, Mr. Lott’s supportive comments about his Senate colleague Strom Thurmond’s long ago segregationist candidacy for president led to Mr. Lott’s resignation as Republican majority leader.
“I want to say this about my state,” Mr. Lott had said, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him.
“We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
He left the Senate in 2007 and settled into a relatively quiet life as a lobbyist in Washington.
Mr. Lott could not be reached for comment on Sunday. But his name was being invoked everywhere in the wake of Mr. Reid’s misadventures.
Given that Mr. Lott resigned, “then Harry Reid should,” Mr. Kyl, the Senate Republican whip, said on Fox News Sunday.
U.S. Rep. James E. Clyburn (Dem., S.C.) disputed the comparison.
“This is in no way analogous to the Trent Lott situation,” Mr. Clyburn said in an interview Sunday.
Mr. Clyburn, the highest-ranking Black in Congress, came to Mr. Reid’s defense on Saturday, soon after the senator from Nevada issued a statement apologizing for the remarks he made to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, the authors of the new book, “Game Change.”
He also expressed his regret in a telephone call to Mr. Obama.
The president accepted the apology and released a glowing statement about Mr. Reid, hailing his record on civil rights and saying that, “as far as I’m concerned, the book is closed.”
Politically speaking , there is a fundamental difference between Mr. Reid’s travails and those of Mr. Lott.
While Mr. Reid’s was instantly forgiven and strongly supported by Mr. Obama, Mr. Lott was not by the Bush administration (Mr. Lott, essentially, accused the Bush White House of abandoning him.)
“Having Obama grant immediate absolution makes all the difference,” said Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist and close friend of Mr. Lott.
It also helps that in this case, that the president himself happens to be the potentially aggrieved party.
And there were similarities to what happened in 2007, when Joseph R. Biden Jr., then running for president, apologized to Mr. Obama after trying to compliment him by saying he was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy.”
Mr. Obama accepted that apology, too, and a year later threw in a nice job with the administration.
Supporters of Mr. Reid said the Reid and Lott situations were also different because of what they say is Mr. Reid’s unimpeachable record on civil rights.
They mentioned Mr. Reid’s support from Black leaders across the country, as well as his efforts to Integrate the Las Vegas strip and Nevada’s gaming industry.
Mr. Lott’s record was more mixed, and included, among things, his previous opposition to making Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday and his vote against the Voting Right’s Act as a member of Congress.
“They are not in the least bit comparable,” said Lani Guinier, the Harvard University law school professor whose nomination as assistant attorney general for civil fights in 1993 was pummeled by conservative groups and eventually withdrawn by President Bill Clinton.”
Mr. Lott’s remarks, Mrs. Guinier said, seemed to be expressing nostalgia for the segregationist platform of Mr. Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign, while Mr. Reid comments seemed to be addressing “an unfortunate truth about the present.”
That truth, she said, is that Mr. Obama would have had a more difficult time getting elected if his skin were darker and if he spoke in a dialect more identifiable as “Black.”
Republicans said that if their current Senate leader, Mr. McConnell, had said what Mr. Reid did, the Democrats and many in the news media would be lining up to demand his resignation.
“Mitch McConnell would be convicted and sent to the Guantanamo if he said what Reid said,” Mr. Rogers said. He contended that Mr. Reid’s remarks were more egregious, because Mr. Lott had intended to praise Mr. Thurmond on the occasion of his 100th birthday party.
Mr. McConnell could not be reached for comment, Mr. Reid’s spokesman, Jim Manley, said that Mr. Reid has no intention of stepping down as leader and would continue his campaign for re-election this year in Nevada--a race many experts said would be a significant struggle for him, especially now.
