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 [3]; his long-standing association with a white supremacist group [4], the Council of Conservative Citizens [5]; and his long history of support for segregation, enthusiasm for Confederate President Jefferson Davis and disrespect for Martin Luther King [6].