Posted on 11/22/2003 4:54:45 AM PST by RJCogburn
Each Tuesday at 12:30 p.m., the Democrats of the Senate gather for a working lunch in an elegant chamber once occupied by the most powerful Senate Democrat of modern times, Lyndon B. Johnson. Every Democrat attends but one: Zell Miller of Georgia.
Senator Miller, in silent frustration with his own party, quit joining his colleagues for the Tuesday lunches a year ago. "I was a stranger in their midst," he says.
Now Mr. Miller is preparing to retire, and has taken his frustrations public. In a blistering parting shot, he has written a book attacking national Democrats as ultraliberal, beholden to special-interest groups and unable to compete in the South. At 71, he has said he will cast his first ballot for a Republican next year, when he votes to re-elect President Bush.
Democrats, furious and bewildered, feel betrayed by a man they spent decades working to elect. But in Republican circles, Mr. Miller is a hot property. At a party last week to celebrate publication of the book, Jack F. Kemp, a former Republican vice-presidential nominee, called him a man "above politics," prompting applause from an audience that included White House lobbyists.
Later, Mr. Miller dashed off to speak at a dinner for The American Spectator, the conservative magazine. There the senator — who became a Democratic star when, as Georgia governor, he delivered a rousing keynote address at the 1992 convention that nominated Bill Clinton — received an ovation from a crowd that hissed at the mention of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
His talk, delivered in his distinctive Georgia mountain twang, sounded much like the final stump speech of his career. It was an explanation of why, "in the winter of my discontent but also the winter of my life," he wrote "A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat" (Stroud & Hall). In both his speech and an interview earlier in the day, the senior senator from Georgia did not mince words.
He branded President Clinton "a disappointment," saying Mr. Clinton had strayed from the centrist philosophy that won him much of the South and the presidency. He called Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign "a disaster." He listed a number of Democrats, including Mr. Clinton, Mr. Gore and Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, who would "do more harm than good" by campaigning for Southern candidates.
He said national Democrats had moved the party so far left that "they are carrying it right into a rathole." Of his party's current presidential contenders, who include three of his Senate colleagues, he said: "They are like polkas. They all sound the same."
Merle Black, a professor of politics at Emory University, says Mr. Miller is offering "the strongest critique I've seen of why Democrats have lost support in the South."
Yet in Georgia and in Washington, some wonder what happened to him. How, they ask, did a lifelong Democrat — a self-described moderate who always shunned the conservative label — become so estranged from his party?
Some, including Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, theorize that like other former governors, Mr. Miller never adjusted to being one of 100 senators. Others, like Professor Black, cite the change in venue: Mr. Miller may be a moderate in Georgia, but in Washington he is a conservative Southern Democrat, among the last of a dying breed.
Still others, like David Worley, former chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, maintain that Mr. Miller — who once worked for the segregationist Georgia governor Lester Maddox but who years later tried to strip the Georgia flag of a Confederate symbol — bends with the political winds. In the twilight of his career, Mr. Worley said, Mr. Miller is living up to an old nickname: Zigzag Zell.
For his part, the senator says his detractors "can't handle the truth." His Republican friends agree.
"He's decided to be with the president because of issues like taxes and Iraq," said one close friend, former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas. "I think that's a very powerful message, and I think it is very harmful to the Democrats, and obviously they are unhappy."
That Mr. Miller even wound up in the Senate at this point in his life was somewhat unexpected. In 1999, after 16 years as Georgia's lieutenant governor and 8 as governor, he retired to Young Harris, Ga., where he had grown up, to relax with his wife, Shirley, and teach at the local community college. But in July 2000, the sudden death of Senator Paul Coverdell, a Republican, upset those plans: to take Mr. Coverdell's place, the Democratic governor, Roy Barnes, appointed Mr. Miller for a period lasting till that November, when Mr. Miller then won a special election to complete the term.
Recalling a talk he had with Governor Barnes before the appointment, Mr. Miller said, "I told him I wasn't going to come up here and do this partisan stuff."
The senator has lived up to those words. He votes so often with the White House that Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, former Republican leader, recalls saying to him, "You know, Zell, you are a Republican."
One of Mr. Miller's pet peeves in the Senate has been the Democrats' use of the filibuster to block judicial nominations of those they maintain would move the appellate courts too far right. At 2 a.m. on Thursday of last week, after eight hours of a debate that would last nearly 40, he complained that Democrats, in threatening to block confirmation of a black woman, Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court, were effectively saying, "Gal, you will be lynched." Civil rights groups demanded an apology, but Mr. Miller defended the language.
With silver hair, erect posture (a holdover from his days as a marine) and a Southerner's gift for storytelling, Mr. Miller looks and sounds like Hollywood's idea of a senator. But in an institution long known for cordiality, his caustic candor has come as a shock. Democrats do not know quite how to respond. Most echo Senator Clinton's terse assessment: "He's entitled to his opinion."
Asked how his Democratic colleagues were treating him, Mr. Miller paused for a moment. "It has not been as bad as you think," he finally said. "They have been very understanding ever since I got here of the way I look at politics. And I think that while they may not always respect, I think" — he sighed — "I think they understand."
As a Senate newcomer, Mr. Miller said, he was shocked to hear lawmakers at the Tuesday lunches ask how "the groups," Senate vernacular for special interests, viewed legislation. He said that he had been expected to follow "a party goose step" and that he was especially appalled when Democratic leaders, opposing labor and financing provisions, fought the legislation that created a Department of Homeland Security. Their decision is widely regarded as one reason Democrats lost control of the Senate last year.
Asked if he regretted coming to Washington, Mr. Miller sounded conflicted. "Sometimes I wish that I would wake up and that all of this, all of it, would be just a dream," he said. "But there are other times when I think that I sure would have hated to have gone to my grave without knowing how messed up Washington and the federal government and the Democratic leadership in particular really is."
Regrets or not, Mr. Miller said he would finish his term, which expires in January 2005. As to the oft-asked question "Why don't you become a Republican," he drew on his storytelling skills for an answer.
"I compare it to being in an old house," he said. "It's a house that I've lived in for years that's getting kind of drafty and hard to heat. The plumbing won't work and some strangers have moved into the basement and I don't know who they are, and there's no doubt I would be more comfortable in another house. But you see, I was here first. I've lived in this house for years and years. It's home, and I'm not going to leave."
Whining, hypocritical, girly man prose from the New York Slimes.
I recall endless Times praise for that RINO weasel Jim Jeffords when he jumped to the rats, having just being re-elected to the Senate by loyal Republicans. It made making Daschle again Majority Leader.
When they can't refute what's being said, they usually resort to name calling.
"Evil Democrat" just doesn't sound right to them.
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