(FORTUNE Magazine) – Trent Lott is organized and logical. He's unfailingly polite. He is the picture of calm. So why is everyone angry at him? Only a year ago the Senate Majority Leader was the symbol of a fresh Republican approach in the Senate. Here was a guy who would not compromise (he had contempt for the art of the deal and for Bob Dole's mastery of it). Here was a guy who had an real affinity for the conservative movement (he had been a Gingrich accomplice in the House). Here was a Mississippi guy who could trump Bill Clinton's Southern-boy routine.

Things haven't turned out the way everyone expected, including Lott, who wants to be President someday but has concluded that 2000 is too soon. The very effort of getting ahead has thrown Lott behind. His Republican critics believe he has taken a page from Clinton's book--using ideology as a tool of ambition rather than being ambitious so as to promote ideology. Lott may regard the President as "a spoiled brat," but he has perfected the Clinton shuffle; he has alienated his friends and placated his enemies on any number of issues: on a budget agreement with the President, on a retreat in the showdown over Midwest flood disaster relief, on an 11th-hour change of heart in the Senate debate on the chemical weapons agreement. And when he embraced the case of Kelly Flinn, the B-52 bomber pilot accused of adultery, it was almost too much for his allies to bear.

This is a bad time for Republicans to have a Senate Majority Leader in a bad way. Gingrich has been declawed; nobody can remember the last time he had anything to say or shaped a piece of legislation. Lott knows the GOP needs to put on a united face as negotiations on important matters, such as the tax bill, consume Capitol Hill and the White House. But the party's various factions are warring as never before. The economic conservatives complain about the child tax credit that the Christian right pushed into the tax bill, while the social conservatives denounce the capital-gains reductions in the bill as a sop to the rich. Even traditional big-business groups have less and less patience with the party's aggressive small-business lobby.

This is a party that needs a spokesman. But Lott is being undercut by a cadre of conservatives who don't believe in retreat, much less surrender, and who talk openly about replacing him. Like Gingrich, he's surviving because of his ties with moderates, not because of his roots with conservatives. Indeed, it is Gingrich and Clinton who define Lott. He and the Speaker share the searing experience of having been an oppressed minority in a Democratic House, but neither has mastered the art of governing with a majority. He and the President have both been clients of Dick Morris; neither has much appreciation for ideological purity. Like Clinton, Lott consorts with the enemy and then settles for a middle ground, leaving others to iron out the details. His apostasy on the chemical-weapons agreement won him the enmity of Paul Weyrich, who wrote him a letter questioning his patriotism ("I can't have friends who sell out their country") and his integrity ("I no longer trust you").

Now Lott is about to face his biggest challenge: figuring out where to stand on trade issues involving China. His advisers have warned him that he can't finesse this one. If he sides with the free-traders and the GOP's business interests, Gary Bauer and the religious conservatives will be all over him. If he sides with the foot soldiers of the Christian right, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will never forgive him. Once again, the man who is supposed to be at the head on Capitol Hill finds himself in the most uncomfortable place--in the middle.

DAVID SHRIBMAN is Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.