Back in the mists of time in the late 1950s when I was a college student in South Carolina, each semester brought at least one personally signed note from Strom Thurmond, already the senior senator of my home state. The dean’s list, a scholarship award or some other small event was occasion enough to trigger congratulations from the most constituent-centered politician the earth may have ever seen.

Ol’ Strom intrigued me. When a professor suggested I make his 1946 race for governor the topic of a senior thesis, I signed up immediately. Thurmond was (pardon the term, senator) the liberal in the field that year. He took a relatively tolerant line — for that day — on race and personal freedoms. He lost. And he never made that electoral mistake again.

So I have my own ideas about the Southern bonding that Trent Lott was aiming for in his nonsensical birthday “tribute” to Thurmond, which may cost the Mississippian his job as Senate majority leader. But the move to oust Lott is about Washington and how things work here, not about any great new discovery about him or the South.

The urgent problem for the Bush White House and the conservatives who are calling for Lott’s leadership scalp is that he has committed the unpardonable Washington political sin. He has called attention to the obvious. Lott has unlocked the door to the attic that contains a family secret no one is ever supposed to acknowledge.

The priority is to get that door locked again and fast: Personalize this problem to Lott, and move him and the problem off front pages and television screens that had been all too content to rush past who Lott was and how he got here.

That’s the Unspeakably Obvious in this case: The roots and electoral core of the highly successful post-Barry Goldwater Republican Party lie in the South’s country-club mix of soft racism and self-enrichment — a mix that Lott now too visibly embodies for comfort. His varnish has come off in a thoughtless moment. He has become the Tin Man without an oil can.

That is not to say that the national Republican Party is racist or the Bush White House, in subtly stoking the leadership challenge to Lott, is acting from racialist motivation. Whatever one thinks about George W. Bush’s policies, his personal commitment to racial equality seems deep and abiding. But his visit to Bob Jones University during the South Carolina primary in the 2000 campaign showed that he also understood how to carry my state against John McCain.

Southerners have traditionally been at ease with single-party state systems that emphasize electoral conformity and homogeneity. That helps make the region a good testing ground for big themes and the herd-like movements that are the dream of modern consultants and spin artists.

Southern white majorities have not changed their habits. They simply moved over en masse to the other side of the boat, changing party registration to punish Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats for the civil rights legislation and upheaval of the 1960s. On that foundation, Lee Atwater, Jim Baker and other campaign managers built a string of GOP presidential victories. Winning was the issue for them, not race per se. The attic stayed locked.

Bill Clinton promised but never delivered a meaningful national dialogue on race and politics. The initial Republican reflex — to make this a Lott problem and dispose of it by disposing of him — suggests the party will not put its hand into that fire either. Only a Stalingrad-like defense by Lott would open the way to that outcome.

It could yet happen. The revolving door that Washington has become this month proves that presidents have something in common with many business executives: The people you want to leave won’t go, and the ones you hope to keep around do go. While Lott was vowing to stay on in the leadership post, Henry Kissinger, George Mitchell and Al Gore bowed out.

Kissinger and Mitchell abandoned the president’s commission to investigate the institutional weaknesses and mistakes that led to Sept. 11, 2001. Too bad. For all the controversy over his manipulative past and his current business connections, Kissinger’s skeptical view of all institutions — particularly the bureaucracies he battled while in government — made him an inspired choice to direct a probe of the CIA, FBI and the rest.

Kissinger is too fiercely protective of his reputation at this point in his life to have taken on a whitewash or a fool’s errand involving this great national tragedy. For Kissinger, the past is past. For Lott, it has hardly begun.

— Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.