But a few blocks away, an announcement went out that the Breaux-Lott Leadership Group—the lobbying firm that belongs to former senator John Breaux, the Louisiana Democrat, and former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican—was being acquired by the enormous Patton Boggs. It's a firm that likes to say it's been a part of "every major piece of legislation and regulatory decision for nearly 50 years." Chairman Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr. called the acquisition a strategic coup that "makes the firm a 'mandatory first stop' for discerning corporate CEOs and general counsel facing complex problems that can be solved in the halls of Congress, the executive branch or the courtroom."

Charmingly, the senators will be bringing along their sons, John Breaux, Jr. and Chester Trent Lott, Jr.

Both firms have a wide variety of clients, but seem to have a nice touch with Wall Street types. Breaux-Lott's recent clients have included Citigroup, the Financial Services Roundtable (whose senior vice president can be seen here), Edward Jones Investments, and Prudential Financial. Patton Boggs' have included Legg Mason, the London Stock Exchange, New York Life, Assured Guaranty (who sued JPMorgan last month), Bloomberg LP, Vornado, the Wholesale Markets Brokers' Association, the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys and the Organization for International Investment.

His maneuver actually maximizes the odds, which are strong in the first place, of his party holding onto the seat. By quitting now, Lott allows Haley Barbour, Mississippi's Republican Governor and the former G.O.P. national chairman, to choose an interim successor -- presumably Chip Pickering, a 44-year-old congressman who has eyed Lott's seat for years and who earlier this year declined to seek a seventh term in 2008 (presumably figuring Lott would be sticking around for a while).

Pickering is the son of Judge Charles Pickering, whose nomination for a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals judgeship was thwarted earlier this decade by Senate Democrats. Pickering, boosted by his quasi-incumbency, would then run in a special election next November to fill the final four years of Lott's term. He would be heavily favored, with the '08 presidential election swelling turnout of casual voters in what is already one of the strongest G.O.P. states at the presidential and congressional levels.

The Democratic bench in Mississippi, as you might expect, is thin. When openings like this occur, the name of former Attorney General Mike Moore, whose landmark lawsuit against Big Tobacco won him fame and even made him a character in the 1999 Michael Mann/Al Pacino film "The Insider," is invariably mentioned. But Moore, who was elected A.G. four times before retiring in 2004, typically resists. Also expect John Arthur Eaves, the Democrat who challenged Barbour in this year's gubernatorial race, to be talked up. Eaves ran an unconventional (for a Democrat) campaign, preaching a message of social conservatism and religious fundamentalism, but still lost soundly.

As for the 65-year-old Lott, his move -- which apparently is not related to health -- is a head-scratcher. Flushed from the G.O.P. leadership in 2002, he seemed likely to retire when his seat came up in 2006. Instead, he held a suspenseful press conference two Januarys ago at which he declared his candidacy for re-election and seemed to re-dedicate himself to the Senate. He won some redemption after the '06 election, when his stealth campaign to return to the G.O.P. leadership paid off with an upset, one-vote victory over Tennessee's Lamar Alexander for Minority Whip, the No. 2 Republican leadership slot.

Lott only secured his victory when several Republicans who had committed to Alexander inexplicably changed their mind at the last minute. The balloting process in highly secretive, so now conspiracy theorists may wonder: Did Lott put out the word that he only wanted the slot for redemption -- and that he'd step aside, clearing the way for Alexander, after a year? In the clubby world of the Senate, where many still consider Lott a victim for the way he was forced from the leadership in 2002, such an argument might have been very persuasive.

Hillary "could decide to run over the Thanksgiving holidays," says Hotline.

Anthony Weiner's press aide is flacking for John Murtha, who is running for the No. 2 job in the house.

Rudyblogger notes that "Those who test the waters but never run (Warner, Feingold) never go through the step of setting up exploratory committees."

Is there a conservative movement to oust Joe Bruno?

Autographed picture of George Pataki...only $20.

The guy who once led Mike Bloomberg's legislative efforts in Albany, Skip Piscitelli, is re-joining his old powerhouse law firm.

Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo partied on election night with Benjamin Barber, according to Ben's translation of a Yiddish newspaper article.

Spitzerblog posts its final thought.

The Fix says Evan Bayh, Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel are winners after the midterm elections. John Kerry, among others, is a loser.

Disgraced former congressman Bob Ney lobbied incoming RNC Chairman Mel Martinez when he was a federal housing secretary.

Kos is excited about the possible return of Republican Trent Lott. "It'd be fun to have Lott to kick around again."

Here is a list of the Democrats who will chair the Senate's 20 committees.

Greg Sargent tries to debunk the notion that Republicans lost the election (as opposed to Democrats winning it).

And pictured above is Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum waiting to hand-deliver some emails to the mayor's staff that she received from parents complaining about the cell phone ban in public schools.

-- Azi Paybarah

In light of the Trent Lott affair, it's worth recalling the party's opposition and grudging assent to affirmative action, voting rights and nearly every other measure designed to help African-Americans. There is much to be objected to about affirmative action or school busing, but the price of opposing them is proposing something else. The Republicans never came up with the something else.

The party of Lincoln's line is: "We're for giving everybody a fair shake. We don't need to do anything special to help along the members of any group-not black people, not any people. Just treat 'em all equal." As "states' rights" is the Republican term for keeping your boot on the black man's neck, so "equal treatment" is Republican-speak for not doing anything. The results of Republican "equal treatment" are to be seen in the new Congress, in which there is not a single African-American Republican. The Congressional Republican Party is lily-white.

Thanks to "equal treatment," it works out that no black Republican got nominated in a Congressional district where a Republican can win. So be it; no discrimination there. Something else is there, however-that none of the powers in the Republican Party thought it was important enough to make sure that there were at least a few African-American Republicans in Congress.

Call it affirmative action, call it good politics, call it the right thing to do, but whatever you call it, the Republicans could have gone out and recruited African-American candidates to run in heavily Republican districts. They didn't. The thought probably never even occurred to them. Both political parties routinely recruit promising people to be candidates. The Republicans apparently don't think there's a single black person promising enough to be recruited. So there were the lily-white Republicans in Congress, flap-flipping in embarrassment over the Trent Lott mess and with nary a black-faced colleague to say a word on behalf of the not-so-Grand Old Party. What could be more convincing than rows of well-fixed, comfortably off, successful white men and white women telling an increasingly nonwhite nation that they oppose racism? Who doesn't believe them when the same people say they're for an equal, interracial society-though not one can point to a single thing they've done to bring that society into existence? How can you doubt us? We're the party of Lincoln.

The White House Republicans are a different story. The Republican President is making a manful effort to recognize talented African-Americans and thereby bring the country a little closer to being a nation of truly equal opportunity. Not only does George W. Bush speak the usual good words, he does good things. In no previous administration have African-Americans played such large and important parts. Moreover, in the end, his education bill-even with its debatable aspects-may well do much to provide effective schooling for African-American children at last.

His chances of getting much credit for it are dim, to say the least. Mr. Bush is likely to be viewed as an aberration, an oddball in a Republican Party which continues to treat racial justice as one more political option-something you give lip service to, but only act on if it's cost-free. Republicans continue to yield to the temptation to win elections by exploiting white racial fears and hatreds. They don't do it the way Trent Lott's boyhood hero, Strom Thurmond, did-by opposing an anti-lynching law-but they do do it.

The goings-on in Georgia during this last election make the point. Governor Roy Barnes and Senator Max Cleland, both Democrats, were defeated because they worked to get the Confederate battle emblem off the state flag. The Republican who won the governorship in Mr. Barnes' place used this hateful issue to get himself elected. That's what Republicans do. In 1998, they did the same thing in South Carolina.

To get elected, Republicans will stoop to whatever it takes to get the six-pack vote. For the last 40 years, the Republican Party-not just individual Republicans-have repeatedly found genteel ways to appeal to that stratum of whites who recoil when an African-American comes near them. The party has not yet had its moment of conversion, its hour of commitment to racial justice, as the Democrats have.

The Democrats' hour of commitment came in August 1948 at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when, after a stirring speech by Hubert Humphrey, then the mayor of Minneapolis, the delegates revolted against the controlling alliance of Northern bosses and swallowtail Southern politicians to vote a powerful civil-rights plank into the platform. This was the moment of commitment, the moment when the party bid adieu to the "solid South" and the certainty of carrying the states of the Old Confederacy in every election. It was the moment that caused Strom Thurmond to run for President as the candidate of the Dixiecrat Party and ultimately to join the Republican Party, where he was welcomed and is honored to this day.

After 1948, the Democratic Party-with all its insufferable foibles and maddening idiocies-became the party of civil rights and the party of human rights. The Republican Party, seeing that the Democrats had embraced a politics sure to anger and embitter a certain kind of white who, even now, can be found in shameful numbers, South and North, had a choice: They could link arms with the Democrats, or they could cash in on the disaffection of those who judge others by the color of their skin, not the content of their characters.

To be sure, there must be millions of Republicans who are fine people without a racist bone in their bodies, but their party has played an insignificant part in the civil-rights upheavals. The two parties being what they are, it followed that a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, led the nation toward racial justice. It's no accident that the African-American civil-rights hero, John Lewis, is a Democratic Congressman from Georgia. There simply are no Republican civil-rights heroes. Thus, Democrats suffer little political injury when one of their own, like Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, is revealed to have a Ku Klux Klan past. Beside having recanted somewhat more successfully than Mr. Lott, Mr. Byrd is dismissed by most people as a political deviant. A Republican does not get the benefit of the doubt.

Least of all does the party get a benefit out of the Lott business. Given the politics of the situation, the White House should have turned the Senator from Mississippi into a pillar of salt within hours of his uttering those insipid encomia to that cadaverous old man, but the President did nothing. The other Republican white men and women in the Senate horsed around and dribbled and drabbled for days and, in general, reinforced the impression that the difference between them and Mr. Lott is that Mr. Lott says in public what they say in private.

Much talk seeps out of Republican enclaves about becoming an inclusive political party. In his home state, the President has worked hard to bring that about and has, at least to some extent, succeeded, especially with people of Mexican background. But when he goes, does all that go too? Compare Texas with California, a state which, a generation ago, was dominated by the Republican Party, and where today a Republican can't get elected thanks to the California party's undisguised preference for blue-eyed blonds.

It's said that Karl Rove, the chief White House political operative, knows this and is intent on making the G.O.P. into a multiracial, multicultural political organization. Perhaps he'll succeed-but at some level, politicians must believe in what they're advocating or it won't work. Sooner or later, the fakirs and phonies will backslide and, at some crucial juncture, reveal themselves to be what they are.

In the meantime, it's reported that in Georgia, as in so many other places, not-so-white persons are arriving from Mexico and India. It would seem that the Republicans have about two more election cycles to get it right or start moseying off toward the landfill of history.

Even Trent Lott is learning that it's possible to wake up one morning as head cheerleader and fraternity president, greeting an endless parade of friends-and then wake up again a few days later as Piggy, the unfortunate victim in Lord of the Flies , with that mob of friends sharpening their spears.

The most important difference between high school and Washington is that national politics requires discussion of "issues" as well as poll-measured popularity. What observation reveals is how much the latter tends to influence the political handling of the former, even in a White House that affects to disdain the ebbs and flows of public opinion. Consider the changing attitudes of press secretary Ari Fleischer (and his various unnamed associates) during the days that followed Mr. Lott's unguarded endorsement of Strom Thurmond's 1948 Presidential candidacy.

At his briefing on Dec. 10-four news cycles after those unwise comments-Mr. Fleischer sounded staunchly supportive of Mr. Lott. On that subject, he was unusually clear in his responses to questioning: "I think that from the President's point of view, Senator Lott has addressed this issue. He has apologized for his statement, and the President understands that that is the final word from Senator Lott in terms of the fact that he said something and has apologized for it …. The President has confidence in him as Republican leader, unquestionably."

That confidence wasn't widely shared, as the President appeared to realize on Dec. 12, when he edged away from Mr. Lott. "Every day our nation was segregated," said Mr. Bush, "was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals." His demurral was eloquent and, according to his aides, deeply felt. But immediately after that speech, Mr. Fleischer made a point of telling a New York Times reporter that "emphatically and on the record, the president doesn't think Trent Lott needs to resign."

By Sunday, Dec. 15, The Washington Post reported that the White House "is hedging its bets." Senior aides were divided about whether to defend Mr. Lott against restless conservative pundits and rivals in the Senate. "Compassionate conservatism," already discredited by the comments of former Bush aide John DiIulio in Esquire , was endangered by the specter of a burning cross. Over the days that followed, Mr. Fleischer returned to non sequitur mode, refusing to repeat his earlier endorsements of Mr. Lott. His White House associates were whispering off the record that since the Republican leader seemed doomed to demotion, the President wouldn't intervene to rescue him.

Executing Piggy won't necessarily expiate the sins of the rest of the tribe, however. It may only call further attention to them.

Mr. Lott's incautious comments at the Thurmond birthday party were a symptom of what has been wrong with the Republican Party, but they weren't the disease. Removing him from leadership is a necessary act of moral hygiene, but it isn't a cure. Dating back to Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy," which first attracted Mr. Lott from the ranks of the Dixiecrats into the modern G.O.P., Republicans have appealed in various ways to "seg" sentiment across the nation. At the same time, they have tried to convince blacks and moderate whites that their party is too modern and too tolerant to countenance racism.

The political result has been a form of racial schizophrenia. The President's father sided with Barry Goldwater and the National Review against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A few years later, the senior Bush voted for an open-housing law. When he ran for President in 1988, his supporters employed the inflammatory racial symbolism of the Willie Horton ad to win over white voters.

Leading figures in the Republican hierarchy today carry heavy racial baggage. As a Supreme Court clerk, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote memoranda supporting the notorious "separate but equal" jurisprudence of Plessy v. Ferguson . As governor of Missouri and later in the U.S. Senate, Attorney General John Ashcroft maintained ties to "white power" advocates in his home state and displayed little concern for racial equality. The President himself, and many of the conservatives who now demand the ouster of Mr. Lott, have never evinced much concern about the blatant bigotry of Jesse Helms, another ancient symbol of the bad old days.

And now, conservatives such as George Will are furious with Mr. Lott not only for what he said about Mr. Thurmond, but for what they regard as the groveling tenor of his apologies.

Dumping Trent Lott won't be the end of this discussion, nor should it be. With or without him, his fellow partisans still have a lot of explaining to do.

Conservative author Andrew Sullivan demanded on his Web log that the Republicans demote Mr. Lott or "come out formally as a party that regrets desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans." Former Bush speechwriter David Frum didn't go that far in National Review Online, but he too expressed shock and anger at the Republican leader-as did Weekly Standard editors William Kristol and Fred Barnes, author David Horowitz and others on the right. (At the lower end of intellectual evolution, Sean Hannity tried to excuse Mr. Lott, as did Rush Limbaugh.)

Now the question is whether the outrage on the right over Mr. Lott's remarks was real-or whether his fellow conservatives were merely upset that he had caused them such embarrassment.

For anyone who missed Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party on Dec. 5, a brief recapitulation of events will be helpful. Readers who depend on The New York Times to learn about current events might not have heard about the bizarre remarks Mr. Lott made on that occasion. Anyway, they need to be repeated until they sink in everywhere.

"I want to say this about my state," the Republican leader boasted. "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."

The centenarian Senator from South Carolina broke from the Democratic Party in 1948 to run for President on the ticket of the National States' Rights Party. Ol' Strom and his Dixiecrat cohort violently opposed the Democrats' early, halting steps against segregation and lynching. There can be no confusion about what an endorsement of their platform meant then, or what it means now.

Nor is there any doubt that Mr. Lott understands exactly what he was talking about. His first political sponsor, the late Representative William Colmer, ran for Congress on the Dixiecrat line in '48. Mr. Lott eventually ran for Colmer's seat-but by then, the Dixiecrats had become Republicans.

All of this sorry history is familiar to conservatives and liberals alike. At the beginning of the civil-rights movement, the great conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan were on the wrong side. They took up their pens on behalf of "Southern civilization," such as it was, against the civil rights of black Americans. Some have expressed regret since then; others haven't. More recently, in reaction to affirmative action, conservatives have claimed to be "color-blind" disciples of Martin Luther King Jr. Rarely does the right offer any positive alternative to redress the legacy of racism.

No honest commentator or politician on the right could have had any doubts, even before this incident, about the true sentiments harbored by Mr. Lott. With his tongue loosened by drink and camaraderie at the Thurmond celebration, he said what was on his moldy mind. He betrayed the same feelings a few years ago at a meeting of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an outfit descended from the White Citizens Councils of the 50's that was expelled from the Conservative Political Action Committee for its blatant racism and neo-Nazism.

The C.C.C. has honored Mr. Lott on many occasions, although he only affected to repudiate them after their connection was exposed in 1998. Six years earlier, he had told the C.C.C.'s national conference in Greenwood, Miss.: "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries!"

So Mr. Lott is a liar as well as a racist. But again, that has been obvious for a long time. To quell the outrage over his remarks at the Thurmond event, his spokesman finally emitted a brief statement ludicrously claiming that the problem was "a poor choice of words." That wasn't the problem. The problem was the meaning of the words spoken by the Republican leader.

Trent Lott is not fit to lead the United States Senate. His "apology" is unacceptable. The pusillanimous response to his latest misconduct of most Democrats-including their Senate leader, Tom Daschle, but with the admirable exception of former Vice President Al Gore-has been awful. But deposing Mr. Lott is a Republican responsibility. Republican Senators must either vote for him again in January or choose an untainted leader. We will then learn the content of their character.

What has been even more troubling than this ugly campaign, however, is the passivity of those who are its targets.

Mr. Daschle and his colleagues have remained inert during recent weeks and months, while their adversaries compared him with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and accused him of giving "aid and comfort" to the nation's enemies. They have stood by in silence while authoritarian propaganda emanated from Republican fax machines and spread across the country. They've allowed the South Dakota Democrat, an Air Force veteran and bioterror target, to be taunted like a traitor by Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and other tough-talkers who avoided military service as if it were anthrax.

From the outset of the G.O.P. jihad against Mr. Daschle last autumn, it has been obvious that the motives of his critics are partisan and political rather than patriotic. Their aim is to regain control of the Senate next November, and they will use whatever divisive means are at their disposal. With no real provocation, Trent Lott, the former Senate Majority Leader, and Tom DeLay, the House Majority Whip, seized upon a few mild remarks uttered by Mr. Daschle about the Bush administration's policy and rhetoric.

His comments were not only careful and inoffensive, as always, but-as recent events in Afghanistan have proved-quite prophetic. "I don't think the success has been overstated," said Mr. Daschle, "but the continued success, I think, is still somewhat in doubt. Clearly, we've got to find Mohammad Omar, we've got to find Osama bin Laden, and we've got to find other key leaders of the Al Qaeda network, or we will have failed. We're not safe until we have broken the back of Al Qaeda, and we haven't done that yet."

The Republicans reacted as if mentioning the obvious is now worthy of punishment by a military tribunal. Mr. Lott, who missed the chance to serve in Vietnam, pretended to be outraged: "How dare Senator Daschle criticize President Bush while we are fighting our war on terrorism?" he cried, as if he hadn't repeatedly criticized Bill Clinton when Americans were in harm's way overseas. Mr. DeLay called the Daschle comments "disgusting." As for Mr. Daschle, he didn't retreat, but neither did he fight back.

So it was refreshing to hear at last from a patriot who found his voice and addressed the Republican Congressional leadership in the tone that they deserve. The first Democrat to speak up was, unsurprisingly, a Senator who has been both a war hero and a war protester.

On March 2, John Kerry took the podium at a political dinner in New Hampshire to defend Mr. Daschle, a colleague who is likely to become his rival for their party's Presidential nomination. What the Massachusetts Senator said about Messrs. Lott and DeLay-and, by implication, about all the would-be White House enforcers-deserved more attention than a single article in his hometown paper, The Boston Globe.

"Let me be clear tonight to Senator Lott and to Tom DeLay: One of the lessons that I learned in Vietnam-a war they did not have to endure-and one of the basic vows of commitment that I made to myself, was that if I ever reached a position of responsibility, I would never stop asking questions that make a democracy strong," he told the audience of New Hampshire Democrats, whose startled murmurs quickly erupted into a standing ovation.

"Those who try to stifle the vibrancy of our democracy and shield policies from scrutiny behind a false cloak of patriotism miss the real value of what our troops defend and how we best defend our troops," he continued. "We will ask questions, and we will defend our democracy."

A combat veteran who received three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star in two Navy tours-and who later founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War-Mr. Kerry has ample stature to challenge the character assassins and commissars of the far right. The day after the Concord dinner, he didn't hesitate to reiterate his rebuke, adding the name of another Southern-fried chicken hawk.

"My message to Trent Lott and Tom Delay and Dick Armey-each of whom did not have to endure the war in Vietnam … the lesson I learned in that war is, the best way to defend American democracy and our soldiers is to ask the right questions at the right time."

Suddenly, it was the Republicans who had nothing to say.

He joined a foreign army–and perhaps an international-terrorist subset of that army–that initiated hostilities against the United States, including the murder of thousands of innocent civilians. He participated in armed violence against American allies in Afghanistan. Before his ultimate surrender, he took part in a prison uprising against those allies, which resulted in the horrible killing of an American intelligence agent.

Mr. Walker is therefore a traitor who deserves the same fate as Timothy McVeigh or worse, isn't he? The only questions remaining are what kind of legal formalities should precede his execution, and whether that satisfying conclusion to the Walker story ought to be televised, perhaps with Bill O'Reilly or some other cable gasbag as master of ceremonies.

So much for those quaint, old-fashioned American notions about the presumption of innocence–now junked, amid wartime hysteria and patriotic posturing, along with other antique provisions of the Constitution. When the Attorney General questions the loyalty of anyone who dissents against his actions, who will dare to stand up for the rights of a turncoat caught in the ranks of the Taliban?

It is easy to condemn any young American who turns against his country, as Mr. Walker evidently did, and even easier to condemn his decision to join the Taliban in oppressing their own people. In doing so, he may well have committed crimes against both the United States and Afghanistan.

Yet there are still many questions left unanswered concerning Mr. Walker, beginning with the still mysterious circumstances under which he came to join the Taliban militia and ending with his exact role in the prison riot that led to C.I.A. operative Johnny (Mike) Spann's death. What did Mr. Walker know about the events of Sept. 11 before his capture? When did he learn that the United States was effectively at war with his Afghan and Arab hosts? What would have happened to him if he had tried to leave? What were his intentions and his mental condition?

None of the reporting so far offers the basis for any fair conclusions–and in any case, he is entitled to a process more rational, orderly and unbiased than trial by sound bite.

The lynch-mob mood surrounding the discussion of Mr. Walker's fate shows how casually the concept of constitutional rights can be abandoned, even in a country where those ideas have developed for more than two centuries. More than a few people who should know better–who do know better–have leaped to denounce the "American Taliban" as if he had not only been indicted but tried and convicted.

Restraint is not to be expected, of course, from the New York Post , which instantly placed Mr. Walker in the headline category of "traitor" and "rat." The tabloid's star columnist has urged authorities to "put him before a military tribunal, get him up against the wall and drill him like a sieve." This is gin-mill justice, as understood by the flag-flapping foreign recruits of the Murdoch organization.

Nor is it shocking that Trent Lott, the Senate Minority Leader, would inflame mob emotion in the style of his friends at the Council of Conservative Citizens. While admitting on Fox News Sunday that he doesn't know "all the facts," the Senate Minority Leader called Mr. Walker "treacherous and treasonous" and said he "obviously is guilty of some really horrible things. He should be tried and at the very minimum, I believe, should be sentenced to jail." Nobody bothered to ask Mr. Lott what the purpose of the trial would be, since he is ready to send the man to jail or possibly the death chamber.

It was more troubling to hear similar pandering from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a person who has herself been subjected to the American media's version of summary justice. "I certainly consider him to have been a traitor to our country," she said on Meet the Press , adding that she didn't mean to suggest what kind of "legal action should be taken." She might instead have followed the better example of Republicans like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who wisely withheld judgment, or her Senate colleague Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

It was Mr. Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran, who listened to Mr. Lott's remarks and then had the courage to say what needs to be said about John Walker: "No question he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong people. And why he was there, the motive behind that, we need to let that play out. We need to talk with him, as we are talking to him. I'm not one who is going to immediately charge him with treason …. I think we need to be a little careful here."

commentators often remark, they are also undoubtedly the lucky party. Over the

past several years, their leaders in Congress have tried repeatedly to recruit

a certain very conservative Democrat from Modesto, Calif., into their ranks. As

recently as last December, the Bush transition team reportedly put Gary Condit

on the short list of its prospective nominees for Secretary of Agriculture.

Only good fortune preserved them from those possibilities.

Instead, it is the unlucky Democrats who continue to bear

the burden of Mr. Condit's presence among their ranks, just as they have been

forced to bear with him ever since he was first elected 12 years ago. With few

exceptions, they've never much liked or respected him, but they now feel

required to afford him the benefit of the doubt in the disappearance of his

alleged lover Chandra Levy, as if he were a loyal member of their party.

And the same Republicans

who until very recently had befriended Mr. Condit-lavishing him with all kinds

of perks and praise normally reserved for their own-suddenly are pretending

that he is just another immoral liberal, a Clinton clone, a target of

opportunity for rumor, suspicion and invective.

This may merely be partisanship as usual, but it is almost

as hypocritical as the journalists who pretend that their drooling obsession

with Mr. Condit's private affairs is motivated by concern for the fate of Ms.

Levy.

Notable among the parade of Republican yakkers rushing

forward to denounce Mr. Condit are Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker

whose own extramarital dalliances never excited the media, and Trent Lott, the

former Senate Majority Leader whose abhorrence of marital infidelity applies

only to Democrats. Like all the other conservatives eager to demonize Mr.

Condit, they can count on the ignorance or amnesia of the journalists covering

this story, knowing that nobody will remind them about their own once-warm

relationships with the California Congressman.

Mr. Gingrich probably remembers Mr. Condit without any

prompting as one of the few Democrats who supported the Contract with America.

A so-called blue-dog Democrat with a voting record almost identical to that of

the most right-wing G.O.P. legislators from his home state, Mr. Condit was

rewarded by the House leadership with a coveted seat on a budget conference

committee and invitations to a weekly strategy session with Mr. Gingrich's

whip, Tom DeLay.

It was only two years ago that Mr. Condit was welcomed as

one of two Democrats at a press conference called by Mr. Lott to promote a

phony bill calling for the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service. Around

that same time, the rising Republican leader John Kasich declared on national

television that "Gary Condit's one of my best friends in Congress, and he's one

of the most conservative Democrats, and he's always helping us to cut taxes and

to cut spending."

As the son of a Baptist minister, Mr. Condit emphasized his

evangelical Christian piety and faithfully attended a Bible-study group in the

Capitol. During the impeachment crisis in 1999, he piped up to scourge

President Clinton and urge the nation to "unite in seeking God" through "days

of prayer." Much to the disgust of other Democrats, he habitually lent his name

to such meaningless nonsense, signing on to no fewer than eight conservative

constitutional amendments in a single year.

Naturally, this kind of demagoguery endeared Mr. Condit to

the conservative media as well. In the aftermath of the Republican takeover of

Congress in 1994, Rush Limbaugh happily predicted that he would switch parties

the week after the election (exactly what the portly talk jock excoriated Jim

Jeffords for doing six years later). Michael Reagan, the son of the former

President and host of a popular ultra-right radio show, singled him out as one of

the few Democrats who could be counted upon to advance Republican ideals.

Then, they loved him. Today, they feed on him.

And they may well be right to portray Mr. Condit as a

scoundrel or worse, particularly if it is true that he initially concealed his

relationship with Ms. Levy from the police. Until hard evidence emerges that he

committed a crime, the demands for his resignation are premature. His future

status ought to be determined by law-enforcement

authorities, the people of his district and possibly the House Ethics

Committee, not the vigilantes of cable television and opinion pages. Tabloid

journalism shouldn't be allowed to void the presumption of innocence.

In the meantime, it must be poignant for Mr. Condit to

recall the days when conservatives and Republicans treated him like a pal

rather than a pariah. It must be especially wounding to think about old

comrades like Mr. Kasich, who once said, "Gary is a good guy, and you know at

times friendship ought to transcend party labels."

But nothing matters more than a party label once the feeding

frenzy begins.

of Congress by corporate money, he correctly takes care to criticize both

parties. But as the Senate debates proposals for reform, it should be clear

that the Senator's main antagonist is and always has been his fellow

Republican, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi. He is an

exceptionally well-developed example of the self-serving "money politician."

Wisely, Mr. McCain tries to avoid public feuding. Yet every

time he has strayed from his party's line over the past several years-on issues

ranging from tobacco control to a patient's bill of rights to wasteful defense

spending-he has been confronted by Mr. Lott, faithful protector of corporate

special interests.

Although the majority leader rarely suffers the kind of

negative ink he's earned, everyone in Washington understands how his fidelity

is regularly repaid with millions of dollars in soft-money contributions to

various G.O.P. committees, including his own. The way such special interests

influence Mr. Lott was illustrated not long ago by an expensive but

little-noticed skirmish between him and Mr. McCain.

The question was whether

Congress would prevent the Federal Communications Commission from repossessing

cellular licenses held by NextWave Telecom Inc. Having won the valuable

licenses in a 1995 F.C.C. auction, NextWave went bankrupt before paying $4.7

billion it owed the government.

But when federal regulators moved to take the licenses back,

the Hawthorne, N.Y.–based company filed a lawsuit to stop the agency, arguing

that its rights were being violated. In December 1999, an investor group led by

communications giant Global Crossing Inc. put up almost $2 billion in new

financing, hoping to grab the ailing company's wide swaths of wireless

spectrum, which had increased in value exponentially.

NextWave and Global Crossing quickly mounted an ambitious

lobbying effort against the F.C.C. They engaged the services of Barbour,

Griffith & Rogers, the hot lobbying boutique set up by Mr. Lott's old

Mississippi pal and former Republican chairman, Haley Barbour. The Barbour firm

also includes a Lott classmate from Ole Miss who formerly served as executive

director of the New Republican Majority Fund, Mr. Lott's personal political

action committee.

On a single day last August, Global Crossing officials gave

the Lott P.A.C. a total of $45,000-just a fraction of the million dollars or so

in soft money doled out to both parties by Global Crossing during the 10 months

that followed its investment in NextWave.

Global Crossing's campaign faced opposition from Mr. McCain,

chairman of the Commerce Committee. The Arizona maverick, who publicly

denounced the bill delaying a new spectrum auction as a "rip-off" of taxpayers,

believed he could kill the bill in his committee.

In late October, however, Mr. Lott abruptly indicated that

he would attach the NextWave bailout as an appropriations "rider," bypassing

committee approval and floor debate.

Outraged by this

maneuver, Mr. McCain shot off a letter to Senate leaders that he also released

to the press. He accused the leadership of maneuvering to "subvert the regular

legislative order and obscure from the American people special interest-driven

legislative riders and pork barrel spending." The majority leader quietly

backed down, leaving his patrons at Global Crossing feeling double-crossed.

"We were talking about as much as a $10 billion difference

to the American taxpayers, whether [the cellular licenses] would be given back

to NextWave or went on the auction [block]," Mr. McCain told me several weeks

after that incident. "We fought tooth and nail to prevent the fix being put

in."

Usually the fix goes in, of course, and Mr. McCain can't do

much about it. His thumbnail history of soft money indirectly indicts the

G.O.P. bosses who now run Capitol Hill.

"When I came to the House in 1983, it was not a perfect

system," he recalled, "but the influence of the special interests was

drastically less than it is today …. As the amount of soft money has gone up

and the amounts of money in these campaigns have gone up, the more I have seen

their control increase."

And meanwhile, Mr.

Lott-who has run the Senate like a jukebox since 1996-easily escapes the

scrutiny of media honchos who complain about money injuring democracy. They

ignore the documented reports produced by public-interest organizations about

his addiction to gambling and tobacco funds. They didn't even cover the

detailed complaint filed against him by the nonpartisan Congressional

Accountability Project for shaking down high-tech lobbyists, or its

unceremonious burial by the Senate Ethics Committee.

It is this unaccountable

power of Mr. Lott and his corporate patrons that is threatened by the

McCain-Feingold bill. Exposing the abuse of that authority is essential to this

initial stage of true reform.