Is the Democratic Party clueless about the modern South?

Jewish World Review ^ | Oct. 21, 2003 | Bill Cotterell

[SJackson]

Toward the end of his new book about why the Democratic Party has lost the South, Sen. Zell Miller, D — Ga., tells of a Georgia neighbor whose mule had ears so long they scraped the ceiling of his small barn.

The man jacked up the corners of the building and shoved flat stones under it, backbreaking labor that made the ramshackle barn even more unstable. Miller suggested digging out a few inches of the dirt floor, instead.

"Son, it ain't the mule's legs that's too long," the farmer replied, "it's them ears." When Miller retires next year to the mountain town of Young Harris, Ga., leading Democrats in Washington and Atlanta won't miss him. He has not only supported President Bush's tax cuts, war policies and judicial nominees, but has also told off his party in terms that families, corporations or politicians normally confide only to counselors behind closed doors.

"A National Party No More," is subtitled "Conscience of a Conservative Democrat," but the tagline could have been "No-Brainers We Can't Figure Out." Miller, who served four terms as lieutenant governor and two as governor, says that — like his neighbor with the barn — his party has a mule — like belief in the wrong approach. (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR. )

"The biggest problem with the party leadership is that they know nothing about the modern South," Miller writes. "They still see it as a land of magnolias and mint juleps, with the pointy-headed KKK lurking in the background, waiting to burn a cross or lynch blacks and Jews." He focuses on the 2002 mid-term elections and the defeat of ex-Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., who was leading U.S. Rep. Saxby Chambliss until the final days of the campaign. That's when congressional Democrats — absent Miller — lined up behind the government employee unions and fought Bush's creation of the new Department of Homeland Security.

Miller, who campaigned for Cleland and made TV ads with him, wasn't surprised that the GOP cast the issue as a test of patriotism — and never mind that Cleland had lost both legs and his right arm in Vietnam.

The first thought on people's minds when the nation was attacked, was not, "Gosh, I sure hope those new federal employees have collective bargaining rights … " A former Marine Corps rifle instructor, Miller believes the correct response to people who want to kill us is to kill them first. His party's presidential contenders, he frets, prefer asking the United Nations to issue stern warning resolutions.

[Reaganwuzthebest]

The elite in our society are much more liberal than the people.

Especially up here in the Northeast where conservatives are far and few between.

[RobbyS]

But almost everywhere. Liberalism appeals to snobs everywhere.