Lott has to know what the Dixiecrat Party was all about. Suppose the words "just slipped out." I am still at a loss to account for the frame of mind that would just randomly pick the 1948 presidential run out of the air when casting about for something nice to say about Strom. Even to recall Strom peeing out the door of the Senate Chamber into a bucket in the cloakroom during his big filibuster would have been better.
Then his apology makes it worse by referring to segregation as "the discarded policies of the past" rather than forthrightly saying that segregation was wrong. What he said could mean no more than "It would have been nice to be able to keep Jim Crow, but I know we can't go back now." Besides which he apologizes in weaselly modern fashion for "offending" people, not for saying something that was objectively wrong to say.
Lott is an adult, of sorts, and he said what he said. I am not much interested in what he meant. I am a little tired of people in our society saying stupid, harmful things and then bleating defensively about what they "really meant." The words he spoke have a meaning, and it is a reprehensible meaning. Lott said them, and then he shilly-shallied around for days, and finally he issued an ambiguous non-apology.
Furthermore, this is not the first time the d**n fool has said stuff like this. At this point, I don't care whether he has a secret nostalgia for Jim Crow that he can't keep to himself, or whether he is just completely irresponsible in his use of language. A man who can't control his tongue has no more business in a position of political responsibility than a man who can't control himself in any other way.
Dump him.