JACKSON - When I wrote about how the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress in mid-term elections would impact Mississippi's delegation, I said Sen. Trent Lott would find some way to land on his feet.
Well, the redoubtable Mr. Lott has done just that, but not as I had speculated.
Trent had become so much of a Republican maverick, I had said, that it was not beyond possibility he could switch affiliation, either to Democrat, which was unlikely, or to independent.
Instead, Trent came out of the shadows and upset the apple cart in his own Republican Party, the party that kicked him out of its leadership four years ago for praising Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential bid.
Still a master of vote-counting, Trent emerged from the closed-door Senate GOP caucus two weeks ago clutching an improbable prize: minority whip, second in line in the GOP Senate leadership.
"This is Lazarus speaking," Time Magazine reported Lott as answering when President Bush called him from Air Force One to offer congratulations. Trent must have enjoyed the moment to make Bush squirm for helping sack him as GOP Senate majority leader in 2002.
As whip, Lott will be back in the job he has held in times past in both the House and Senate - herding cats, the title he gave to the memoir that he published last year.
He upset Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander by just one vote to prove once again his ability to "herd cats," and provide reason enough for the Republicans to risk restoring Lott to the A-team even though he's on the outs with the White House and could be a liability to the GOP's effort to reach out to black voters.
In regard to the latter, after his remarks at the Thurmond affair four years ago enraged many in the African-American community, Lott went to great lengths to be forgiven, apologizing on black television and appearing inconspicuously at a small Arlington Cemetery memorial service at the gravesite of assassinated Medgar Evers.
To some degree, Lott's new role will help Mississippi recoup some of the power it lost when the mid-term election resulted in Thad Cochran losing his powerful Senate Finance Committee chairmanship. (Cochran, incidentally, never said if he voted for Lott to become party whip.)
Lott has another asset that his GOP colleagues must have recognized now that they are in the minority: his ability to work across party lines with Democrats, as he proved when Bill Clinton was president in the 1990s and Republicans controlled the Senate.
In two notable instances in 1996, he helped Clinton pass the Welfare Reform Act and the Telecommunications Deregulation Act. (Some right-wing critics, however, later accused Lott of not pulling the trigger in Clinton's 1998 Senate impeachment trial.)
Now with only a slim two-vote majority in the Senate, Democrats must also be wary of Lott's vote-counting ability. If he can muster the "magic" 60 votes necessary to invoke the Senate's filibuster rule, he could block any Democratic initiative.
Some political analysts have observed that Senate Republicans were actually smarter than House Republicans after the mid-term election disaster by reaching back for an old legislative hand like Lott and not keeping the same leaders as the House GOP did.
Meantime, Mississippi's two Democratic House members - Reps. Gene Taylor and Bennie Thompson - were on opposite sides in the race for Democratic majority leader. Taylor helped manage the losing candidacy of fellow "Blue Dog" Rep. John Murtha, D-Penn., a decorated Vietnam veteran who a year ago sounded the call picked up by others to begin withdrawing American troops from Iraq.
Thompson backed Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., who trounced Murtha despite Murtha's public endorsement by incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
I had raised a point in writing about the mid-term election's impact on Mississippi's congressional delegation, that 1st District Republican Rep. Roger Wicker had been re-elected to a seventh term despite the term-limits precept in the GOP's 1994 "Contract With America" which helped sweep him and other Republicans into office.
His dad and my old friend, former state Sen. (and later judge) Fred Wicker, informs me that Roger had opted out of the term-limits pledge from the beginning. Some others in the 1994 class, however, did abide by it.
