A LOTT LIKE CLINTON?

By DAN GOODGAME

Trent Lott, like Bill Clinton, learned much of what he needed to know about politics in junior high. But if Clinton appealed to the popular kids and made himself the center of attention, Lott made his way more quietly, by rounding up the strays one handshake and one favor at a time.

His family had just moved from the hills of upstate Mississippi to the shipyard town of Pascagoula, so Lott entered the seventh grade as a stranger. He was too slight for such sports as football, so he played tuba in the band. And he had such a space between his front teeth that he was nicknamed Gap.

But from those early days at Pascagoula Junior High, the well-starched and whip-smart boy started reaching out, discreetly helping others with homework. He paid special attention to the kids who, like himself, weren't athletic or attractive. "And you know what?" he says. "Turns out we were the majority."

By his senior year in high school, Lott was elected Mr. Everything: president of the student body and drama club, homecoming king, most popular, most likely to succeed, most polite and, of course, neatest. Even after Lott became a big man on campus, recalls his classmate Gaylen Roberts, he took time for "everybody, from the shy girls to the guys we would describe these days as gang members."

Ever since, even after he got his teeth fixed, Lott has advanced himself by assembling such snaggletoothed majorities. As the House Republican whip, or chief vote counter, during the early 1980s, Lott helped forge alliances with both the Boll Weevil Democrats, who were ignored by their party's liberal leaders, and with Newt Gingrich's angry band of G.O.P. radicals, who paid their party's elders as much deference as would Hell's Angels swaggering into a bar full of Shriners. Lott won the trust of both sides and remained the Happy Warrior: backslapping and optimistic, the bass of the Capitol's barbershop quartet.

Now Lott's misfits are the Republican majority, and he is their natural leader. His formative experiences entwine, like honeysuckle, with those of his chief interlocutor, Bill Clinton--like Lott, an ambitious, working-class son of the South. In a capital that cares more about power than sex, theirs will be the most intriguing coupling of the next four years.

Clinton is the master of the air, of the televised town meeting and the ad campaign. But now the key battles over spending and tax cuts shift to conference rooms, where Lott is master of the ground. He arrives well armed, as the only national leader to emerge from the last election with his power enhanced and his image unsplattered by campaign-finance scandals.

Lott and Clinton have already filled this moment with suspense and promise: the President himself traveled to Capitol Hill to open negotiations with leaders of the new Congress, and in their own risky goodwill gesture, Lott and the G.O.P. have agreed to work from the President's budget rather than write their own. But last week provided an even more striking example of the pragmatic detente between the two men: after months of private conversations with the President, Lott went public with a proposal that would have the effect of restraining Social Security and other entitlements. He called for a panel that would come to grips with the Consumer Price Index, which most economists believe overstates inflation, and government checks. That was a revolutionary statement in a city notorious for its fear of offending the seniors lobby. But this time Lott's remark was not met with the usual partisan fire. Clinton called it a "good, constructive suggestion" and dispatched his chief of staff and budget director to drum up support for it among lawmakers and editorial boards.

In their private talks, Lott has emphasized to Clinton that if they can join to make one tough decision on the CPI, they can avoid "a hundred tough decisions down the road." The pair already have an unlikely record of cooperation: last summer, shortly after Lott succeeded Bob Dole as Senate majority leader, he surprised both his G.O.P. colleagues and the White House by skillfully brokering deals to pass bills that, with Clinton's signature, reformed welfare, increased the minimum wage and made health insurance more portable for workers changing jobs. Those accomplishments helped ensure the re-election of both the Democratic President and an even stronger Republican majority in the Senate. But this time around, something bigger is at stake. Lott's new strength and Clinton's desire for an enduring legacy would seem to set the stage for genuinely bold reform of those political albatrosses, Social Security and Medicare.

Their shared personal histories, however, suggest that Lott and Clinton are capable of missing the moment. So which will it be? Will they "hold hands and jump off the cliff" together, as Lott likes to say? Or will they hold hands and tiptoe around unpleasant choices?

Born into the Deep South of the 1940s, Lott and Clinton are the sons of demanding moms and alcoholic dads or stepdads. Both were "miracle" children in their mothers' eyes: Clinton was born just after his biological father died in a car wreck; Lott arrived six years after his parents began trying to conceive a child. Lott was an only child and, like Clinton, was treated as an adult from an early age. Both were called upon to mediate frequent arguments between their parents, though Lott's father, unlike Clinton's, was not physically abusive. Still, both men learned to avert conflict, avoid touchy subjects and try to keep everyone happy. Both also developed traits useful for counting votes. Says Lott: "I learned to watch people's body language, look in their eyes to see whether what you were hearing was what they were really saying."

Both Lott and Clinton were unathletic in communities that prized prowess on the field. They excelled at their studies, music and campus politics--yet both failed in their bids for student president in college. Both avoided the draft. Both married politically shrewd women from families of higher social standing. Neither man much cares for alcohol, though both enjoy a celebratory cigar. Both are Baptists who believe in "redemption and resurrection"--as Lott often reminds a wayward lawmaker whose vote he is seeking.

Neither Lott nor Clinton has worked longer than a couple of years in the private sector. Neither has accumulated any significant wealth or cares much about it. Both, however, care deeply about the political power that campaign cash can buy and are willing to trade favors to get it.

But their affinity also fuels an undercurrent of contempt. Each says of the other, in nearly identical words: "I know his type," or "I knew guys like him back home." And that's partly because they walked different paths even before they left their small hometowns. Virginia Clinton doted on her son so much that she turned over the master bedroom to him. Iona Lott, however, recalls that "people used to say an only child would be spoiled and selfish. And I was determined he wouldn't be that way." She made Trent share everything, including the pony she got him before he was 10, when the family still lacked an indoor toilet.

Lott and Clinton are also five years apart, a gap that feels like a whole generation. Clinton came of age in the late 1960s, surrounded by the Eastern elite: at Georgetown University, Oxford and Yale Law School. He protested for racial justice and against the war in Vietnam. He grew a beard, didn't inhale and was as undisciplined then as now, studying in last-minute crams and failing to earn a degree at Oxford.

Lott defined himself in a very different time and place: the Mississippi of the late 1950s and early '60s, a state infamous for its violent resistance to black equality, even as it began to offer undreamed-of opportunities to the bright children of blue-collar whites. Lott, the son of a schoolteacher and a sharecropper turned shipyard pipe fitter, not only could get loans to enter the University of Mississippi, the state's top nursery of political talent; he also joined a prestigious fraternity, Sigma Nu.

As tidy as Clinton was sloppy, Lott dressed as crisply as a Sears-catalog model, showed up on time with his homework done and protested nothing. Neither the civil rights movement nor the Vietnam War made much of an impression on him. "I and my classmates came up in more of a positive, upbeat, 1950s kind of great time," says Lott. "We didn't think about national issues."

Lott regards Clinton as part of a generation reared in a more "permissive" and "anti-Establishment" atmosphere. He groups Clinton in a class of such other young Democratic Governors as Ray Mabus of Mississippi and Buddy Roemer of Louisiana, who "went off to school at places like Harvard and Yale and then came back to instruct their fellow Southerners in the errors of our ways."

For his part, Clinton sees Lott as the kind of Southerner who eagerly sought to join the local power structure and didn't give a damn about those who didn't enjoy the same opportunities. No one has ever accused Lott of using racist language or appeals, but Clinton looks askance at Lott's voting record: against extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; against the federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.; against a memorial for civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi; in favor of extending tax breaks to segregated schools. Political consultant Dick Morris, who has worked with both Lott and Clinton, writes in his memoir that during the welfare debate last summer, Clinton privately shouted that Lott "loved cutting off children! You should have seen his face! He was delighted that he could savage them, delighted!"

Democratic Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, who is also close to both Lott and Clinton, considers the majority leader a compassionate man but one who does not believe government needs to compensate for past injustices. "Trent thinks that if he could make it, anybody can" and that Washington should provide the kind of help he got through such programs as college loans instead of fostering welfare dependency, Breaux says. "Bill Clinton emphasizes that even if you started out working class, you still have to realize that some people have a harder time working their way up than you did because they didn't have the same advantages."

Trent Lott's attitudes toward the role of government and racial issues were shaped by his upbringing in Pascagoula, which was quite different from most of the South. The town was defined by the Ingalls shipyard, which offered training and good wages and lured workers from all over the region. Most workers reckoned that whatever the state and local governments did to satisfy Ingalls--and the paper mill and the oil refinery and the shrimp-and crab-processing houses along the river--was money well spent.

To attract and retain industry, politicians gave away valuable land, tax abatements, municipal water, road improvements and exemptions from environmental protections. The paper mill smelled like rotten eggs, and the menhaden plant reeked of rotten fish, but the men who worked there would shrug and say, "All I smell is a job."

Even when the shipyard periodically had to lay off workers, they didn't expect much in the way of government benefits--and they didn't want to be taxed to pay for them. Many workers owned a fishing boat or a vegetable patch that they could work until the yard started hiring again. When people in the Pascagoula area wanted redress against a big company, they tended to look to the courts, whose juries could be quite populist. Southern Mississippi is home to a small but aggressive plaintiff's bar, featured twice over the past year on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and on episodes of 60 Minutes. For all of Lott's passion for tort reform, one of the nation's wealthiest tormentors of tobacco companies is his brother-in-law Dick Scruggs, beside whose pool the majority leader can often be found, sipping a Coke and working his cell phone, whenever the Senate is out and the weather is warm.

Pascagoula was settled over the years by immigrants from France and Spain, Lebanon and Yugoslavia--but by very few slaves. In Lott's youth, as now, blacks numbered only about 18% of the area's population, and whites did not feel as threatened as they did in the black-majority counties of the Mississippi Delta. While most neighborhoods were segregated, the races mixed easily on the streets and in factories, where jobs were available to everyone.

Most people earned roughly the same wages and lived in the same four- and five-room houses. "It was a society with almost no distinctions based on wealth or social standing," says Lott's friend Robert Khayat, who grew up in a neighboring town, went on to play pro football with the Washington Redskins and now serves as chancellor of Ole Miss.

There were, of course, many distinctions based on race, including the segregated schools that some of Lott's friends came to see as unjust. But Lott had enough trouble at home; he didn't need to stir up any more if it could be avoided. And in Pascagoula, it could. Most of his white classmates could say, as Lott does, that "race just wasn't that big an issue for me growing up."

Both race and class became big issues, however, during Lott's years at Ole Miss, which had no black students when he arrived in 1959. There the student yearbook invoked the charms of "darkies singing softly in the moonlight" along the levee. Social life and student politics were dominated by the big fraternities and sororities, where Lott encountered sons and daughters of Delta planters who looked down not only on blacks but also on members of the smaller Greek organizations and the "independent" students who either couldn't get accepted into a fraternity or sorority or couldn't afford it.

Lott felt a kinship with members of the lower social orders at Ole Miss but characteristically did not express it by confronting the snobs and bigots. Instead he turned it to his political advantage. Even as he ingratiated himself with the big men and women on campus, Lott in his political campaigns lavished attention on the little people, stressing his roots as the son of a shipyard worker. Soon he had built himself another snaggletoothed majority, which helped win him election as president of the interfraternity council and as a cheerleader.

During Lott's senior year at Ole Miss, on Sept. 30, 1962, armed U.S. marshals moved to install Air Force veteran James Meredith as its first black student. They were met by rock- and rifle-wielding students and other rowdies. In the violence that ensued, two were killed, scores injured and 150 arrested. A small band of white students publicly called for peaceful integration of the campus, but Lott was not among them. Nor was he among the rioters. He concentrated on keeping his frat brothers away from the violence, and he succeeded. "Yes, you could say that I favored segregation then. I don't now," Lott says. "The main thing was, I felt the Federal Government had no business sending in troops to tell the state what to do."

After earning a B.A. in public administration, Lott enrolled in the Ole Miss law school. By now his parents were separated and unable to help him financially. He had saved some money from summer jobs at a root-beer stand in Pascagoula and at the local hospital as a janitor mopping rooms. He took out federal student loans. And he secured paid jobs with the university, first as a recruiter and later as a fund raiser for the alumni association, where he expanded his political network.

The Vietnam War was heating up, but Lott, like other students, enjoyed an exemption until his graduation from law school in 1967. By then he had married Tricia Thompson of Pascagoula and, according to Selective Service records, secured a "hardship" exemption because of the impending birth of their first child Chet. Lott says he was so focused on his studies and student political matters, such as getting soda machines in the dorms, that he didn't think much about either protesting the war or volunteering for it. Vietnam, like civil rights, was another uncomfortable subject to be ducked.

The young Lott family returned to Pascagoula, where Trent practiced law. But after less than a year, the district's veteran Congressman, William Colmer, chairman of the rules committee and a staunch segregationist, offered Lott a top staff job. The family packed their belongings into a green Pontiac Bonneville and set out for Washington, as Tricia put it, "to stay a couple of years and see if we liked it."

When Colmer, a Democrat, in 1972 announced his retirement from the House, Lott declared his candidacy--as a Republican--and eventually won his mentor's endorsement. Lott proved an energetic and persuasive campaigner. As he later explained to his son, "If a little old lady with a cane and a mustache asks you to kiss her, you better do it and enjoy it, or she's gonna know it." Lott lost 15 lbs. that he didn't have to lose. He sometimes lost his voice. But he won the election.

Once in washington, Lott vowed to "fight against the ever increasing efforts of the so-called liberals to concentrate more power in the government in Washington." But he voted for more federal spending on the military, farm subsidies, rural public works projects and entitlement programs. The main federal activities he opposed were taxes and programs for the poor. When supply-side economics came along, it was a special godsend to Lott: a theology that encouraged tax cuts without spending cuts, a new way to avoid hard choices.

In 1985, for instance, he opposed a Reagan-sponsored tax-reform bill that would have closed certain special-interest loopholes. That same year, Lott and Congressman Jack Kemp persuaded Reagan not to support the Republican Senate's efforts to reduce the cost of living allowances for Social Security, and the measure failed in the House. Two years later, Lott joined with Democrats to override Reagan's veto of a pork-larded highway bill, explaining that he wanted some of that spending for his district. And in 1990 he opposed President Bush over a deficit-reduction package that included both spending cuts and the "new taxes" Bush had forsworn.

Lott's rationale for his new low-risk behavior cleverly marries today's mechanistic, poll-driven politics to an older philosophy that politicians shouldn't get too far in front of their constituents. Whenever a legislator votes differently from an informed majority of his constituents--as measured by Dick Morris or some other pollster--"your constituents are usually right," Lott says, "and you are wrong."

When Lott became Senate majority leader last summer, he found a new model of pragmatism in a slim volume called First Among Equals, which included a chapter on Robert Taft, the Ohio Republican who led the Senate during the Truman Administration. Like Lott, Taft was a staunch conservative who forcefully stated his views and didn't compromise on matters of principle--but who also worked to achieve the best deal available. "You can't usually get 100% of what you want in politics," Lott says. "But if you can get 80%, or most of what you want, that's usually worth doing."

Which helps explain why Clinton and Lott regularly meet and talk on the phone and enjoy the easy rapport of two pros at the top of their game. Leon Panetta, who recently resigned as Clinton's chief of staff, said the two "like playing with each other, trying to find out as much as possible while giving as little as possible away." As in any productive negotiation, both Lott and Clinton will occasionally say, "Now, if I were to do X, what would be your response? Could you do Y?" Each man is also listening for clues to the same unspoken questions: Will the two of us work together for legislation that will benefit the majority of Americans and make us both look good? Or will one of us pull back and play to a smaller audience of partisan carnivores who don't share middle America's bland taste for bipartisan accomplishment?

Lott wonders how much Clinton's dealmaking will be constrained by the President's desire to help Vice President Al Gore in the Democratic primaries of 2000. Almost any compromise with Lott and his Republicans is sure to bring Gore under attack by House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt and others on the left of the party. For his part, the President wonders whether Lott is positioning himself to run for the G.O.P. nomination in 2000. Clinton knows Lott keeps an active fund-raising schedule.

There is reason to believe, however, that the two men will fall back on their instincts for cautious progress. Assessing Lott's legislative successes last summer, Republican strategist Ken Duberstein observes that "Trent understands that we're a nation of incrementalists who like our progress in bite-size portions." And Clinton, after the failure of his massive health-care program in 1994, seems to have reached the same conclusion. So it is likely that the courtship of Washington's hottest couple this year will look like this: Trent and Bill, holding hands and taking, if not a leap, then at least one sensible step at a time.