When Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) sprang into action minutes after a sport-utility vehicle rollover accident on a Florida highway on New Year’s Day, he made just the sort of headlines everyone likes to see, especially his fellow Republicans.
He also symbolized the ways in which President Bush and the GOP, having survived the storm kicked up by Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), may have come out politically ahead in the long run.
“As a doctor, my first instincts are to help,” he said after the accident where two died, including a 10-year-old girl. But paramedics, who arrived on the scene after Frist, praised the incoming majority leader’s help in saving the other four victims.
Emergency rescue is not a new role for Frist, a surgeon. When a gunman opened fire in the U.S. Capitol in 1998, Frist rushed to the aid of at least two victims. In 1995, he revived a 60-year-old man who collapsed inside a Senate office building.
So it is easy to believe that politics were not on his mind at the time of the accident in Florida. But for those of us who can’t stop thinking about politics, the episode was symbolic of the hopes Bush and other Republicans have for Frist, as he replaces Lott as the Senate’s majority leader on Tuesday.
Frist is known to be an expert at repairing people. Now, we wonder, can he repair the damage Lott has done to the image of Bush, his party and his agenda?
Senate Republicans selected Frist to replace Lott, who had to go after dropping his rhetorical stink bomb at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s (R-S.C.) 100th birthday party.
A light-hearted Lott sounded like he was endorsing Thurmond’s segregationist presidential bid in 1948, a position Thurmond himself long ago discarded.
Then Lott dug himself deeper into a hole with his desperation appearance on Black Entertainment Television, where he suddenly supported affirmative action, a holiday to honor the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and numerous other issues he steadfastly has voted against.
“My actions,” he said with a straight face, “do not reflect my voting record.”
Say what?
By then the issue had become not only racial tolerance but Lott’s competence and his party’s credibility. He had to go.
And up steps Frist. Hollywood could hardly have cast a more warm, engaging and heroic figure to heal the wounds, as he promised he would try to do.
“Dr. Frist,” as his allies like to call him on Capitol Hill, emphasizing his stature, intelligence and winning charm, has a reputation for moderate politics that, on some hot-button issues like gun control and abortion, have offended some right-wingers as not being conservative enough. He notably has volunteered for missionary work in Africa. He embodies the image of “compassionate conservatism” that Bush has tried to project.
Yes, there have been charges that earlier in his career Frist also used racial code words.
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At least three times in his 1994 Tennessee Senate race against Democratic incumbent Jim Sasser, Frist said in various forms, “While I’ve been transplanting lungs and hearts to heal Tennesseans, Jim Sasser has been transplanting Tennesseans’ wallets to Washington, home of Marion Barry.”
Oh? One might wonder what Barry, who happens to be black and who FBI cameras happened to catch smoking crack but who did not happen to be mayor of the District of Columbia during Frist’s campaign, had to do with Tennessee’s Senate race.
Nevertheless, Democrats probably don’t want to make a big deal out of that particular coded episode, unless they want to remind America of Barry’s brand of leadership. Frankly, I doubt that they do.
That leaves his fellow Republicans to voice the biggest complaints about Frist so far. Some of his fellow senators wonder whether he is tough enough, conservative enough or experienced enough as a leader.
Which should make this upcoming congressional session an interesting one to watch. Now that Republicans have gained control of the Senate again, they have to fight to keep it, if they can avoid fighting too much among themselves.
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