May 24 (Bloomberg) -- Senator Trent Lott keeps a dog-eared piece of paper in his pocket showing which senators supported his proposal to spend $700 million to move a railroad line in his home state of Mississippi, and which opposed him.

Lott keeps the paper so he can ``pull it out and remind people who voted with me and who didn't,'' he said.

A former Senate majority leader, Lott, 64, has never stopped keeping score as he eyes a possible return to the Republican leadership after the November elections.

Lott said he might run for whip, the No. 2 job, if Mitch McConnell of Kentucky moves up to replace retiring Majority Leader Bill Frist and the No. 3 Republican, Rick Santorum, loses his tight re-election race. Lott doesn't rule out a bid for the top spot if Republicans lose so many seats in November that the caucus demands leadership changes and resists promoting McConnell.

``So much of it depends on how things go the rest of the year, how elections go, what my temperament is later on,'' Lott said. ``Certainly, I'm keeping those options open.''

Lott resigned as Republican leader in December 2002 when his praise for former South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist campaign for president sparked a firestorm of protest.

After his fall from power, Lott took over the chairmanship of the Senate Rules Committee and has since slowly rehabilitated his image.

Rare to Return

It's rare for congressional leaders to return after being forced out, said Richard Forgette, chairman of the political science department at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

One exception is House Majority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who won the No. 2 House Republican position this year after being voted out eight years ago as chairman of the House Republican Conference.

Lott's return would be an even more ``remarkable feat'' since he stepped down as a result of comments that generated a national backlash, Forgette said.

Some Senate Republicans now say that they fondly remember Lott's tenure as majority leader and are open to the idea of his return to a leadership post.

``He's one of the best movers of legislation in the Senate,'' said Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. ``He's very highly regarded. He's a tremendous strategic thinker. He has a tremendous reservoir of respect within the whole Senate, but especially among Republican members.''

Claimed Commitments

Still, in a race for majority leader, Gregg said he would back McConnell, 64, who claims to have commitments from at least 40 of the 55 Republican senators.

Lott's opportunity to return to leadership has been aided by the missteps of other Republican leaders, including Frist and President George W. Bush, two people he once criticized as political obstacles.

Frist's record as majority leader has been mixed, and he suffered another setback this month when his proposal to give Americans a $100 rebate to offset soaring gasoline prices drew ridicule from House Republican leaders before it was withdrawn.

Bush has record-low job approval ratings, dragged down mainly by the public opposition to the war in Iraq.

In a book Lott published last year, ``Herding Cats: A Life in Politics,'' he laid out his version of the events in the Thurmond controversy, while revealing his disappointment with the way he was treated by Frist and Bush.

Lott resigned after he was criticized for saying at Thurmond's 100th birthday party that if the rest of the country had followed Mississippi's lead in voting for Thurmond for president in 1948, ``we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years.''

Apologies

Lott's apologies failed to end the controversy, and he stepped down amid indications from the White House that Bush wanted Frist to replace him.

Lott, in his book, called his remarks ``innocent and thoughtless'' and made clear that he saw Frist, 54, as an opportunist for moving to replace him. Lott said he saw the ``power grab as a personal betrayal.''

Bob Stevenson, a spokesman for Frist, declined to comment about what Lott said in the book.

Lott also recounted remarks by Bush administration officials suggesting Bush wanted a replacement, and said that when Bush called to offer sympathy, Lott responded: ``Thank you, Mr. President, but the rumors did hurt me, and you didn't help when you could have.''

Pensions and Lobbyists

Lott is now one of the Senate's most important negotiators on an overhaul of pension law, and is also Senate Republicans' leader on a measure designed to curb the influence of lobbyists.

Hurricane Katrina, which devastated much of the Gulf Coast and destroyed Lott's home in Pascagoula, Mississippi, has helped vault him back into the limelight. Lott and the state's other senator, Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran, sponsored key legislation offering tax breaks and other federal aid to the Gulf Coast.

In recent months, Lott seems to have relished his ability to speak more openly about his disagreements with the Bush administration. After the president threatened to veto legislation preventing a Dubai-based company from taking over operations at six U.S. seaports, Lott told the Washington Times he was ``offended,'' adding, ``Okay, big boy, I'll just vote to override your veto.''

Hurricane Recovery

Earlier this month, he said that legislation including funds to pay for hurricane recovery in Mississippi would be better if the administration's proposals were eliminated in favor of the ideas he shares with Cochran.

``I've been there, I know the sites, I know what the difficulties are, I know what the solutions are,'' he told reporters. ``And when they don't bother to call and ask and they don't discuss it with us, to hell with them.''

Lott said that, among caucus leadership jobs, he would prefer the role of whip, the chief vote-counter. ``The whip gets to freelance more, and it's kind of like being the cavalry,'' Lott said.

Senator Robert Bennett, a Utah Republican who is managing McConnell's bid for leader, said that Lott has little chance of wresting support away from McConnell. Lott is probably just enjoying speculation that he might seek that job, Bennett said.

``My sense of things, talking to Trent, is that he's more comfortable in the whip's job,'' Bennett said. He said McConnell's support is unlikely to slip, even if Republicans lose seats in the Senate, because the party is more likely to blame Frist than the No. 2 for the losses.

``While McConnell has been, and will remain, very loyal to Bill Frist, he's not Bill Frist,'' Bennett said in an interview. ``So if there is a disastrous election, which I don't expect, it isn't automatic that we have to clean house of the whole leadership.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Laura Litvan in Washington at llitvan@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 24, 2006 00:01 EDT