Southern Partisan
Below find Lott's 1984 interview with the periodical Southern Partisan, via Talking Points Memo.

Page one, two, three, four, five.

My two favorite quotes:
"Look at the costs that are involved in a Martin Luther King holiday."
and
"When President Reagan said he supported those fundamental values that all religious people support--Catholics and Jews as well as Protestants--[Democrats say] that's wrong." (Two kinds of Christian and Jews: that's the sum of America's religious diversity?)

As much as these quotes are a nice sneak peek into Lott's mind, there's something more subtle--and a little bit more intellectually loathsome--you notice in his rhetoric if you read the whole interview: tribalism delivered in the form warmed-over and oversimplified history. Lott talks about how he stands for the ideals of Jefferson Davis. To the extent that Davis is almost uniformly judged by history to be an ass, I agree with him. But Lott's not really talking about the historical Davis, any more than he's talking about the real Harvard when he uses the word as a slur, or any real philosophy of government when he says he favors states' rights.

He's just tossing around red meat buzzwords for sullen people to rally around. Add it all up and you don't get any ideas, you just get "we're not liberals." Marry that lumheadedness to Lott's legendary love of pork, and you get the amorphous blob of crap legislation that Lott has supported as long as I can remember. That and a vacuum of leadership.