Posted on 09/08/2003 7:59:35 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
''If this is a national party, sushi is our national dish. If this is a national party, surfboarding has become our national pastime. These people leading our party and those asking to lead our party are like a bunch of naive fraternity boys who don't know what they don't know.''
So writes Georgia Sen. Zell B. Miller, lifelong Democrat, in a new book excoriating his political party and suggesting the national Democratic Party is on the brink of suicide.
Entitled ''A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat,'' Miller's tome is not scheduled to hit the bookstores until November, but it is already stirring a firestorm of controversy among insiders who have seen some or all of its contents.
On one level, the Miller book tears into the Democratic Party, which nurtured and supported him through a half century of political battles. Old faithful donkeys will be outraged.
On a second front, a fuss is developing over who is to publish the book - a brand-new outfit called Stroud & Hall or Mercer University Press.
Stroud & Hall is the brainchild of Cecil Staton, former head of Mercer Press and an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress last year. Staton is still a member of the Mercer faculty. Mercer officials say the Miller manuscript may rightfully belong to them. We'll leave the legal infighting aside.
For now, let's consider Miller's all-out attack on the party that carried him to victory as a town mayor, a state senator, a lieutenant governor and governor.
Because he wore a Democratic label, Gov. Roy Barnes turned to Miller as a replacement for Republican Sen. Paul Coverdell after Coverdell died in 2000.
After his appointment, Miller easily won election to complete Coverdell's term. Considered the most popular homegrown politician in the state, Miller announced in January he would not seek re-election.
Miller's broadside attack on the Democrats is hardly shocking. Almost from the day he arrived in Washington, he broke with the Senate Democratic leadership on a number of key issues. He favored confirming John Ashcroft as attorney general; he supported President Bush's tax cuts and war initiatives; he even fought for a change in the Senate filibuster rules to allow approval of Republican judicial appointments.
He became a pariah among Democrats whom he had once defended. His former very good friend and supporter, Sen. Hillary Clinton, snubbed him in her recent best-selling book, "Living History." Other national Democrats snarl when they hear his name.
But Miller has always had a second sense about the feelings of the voters back in Georgia. He urged fellow Georgia Democrat Sen. Max Cleland to follow his lead in last year's election, but Cleland shrugged off Miller's advice and endorsed the agenda of the national Democrats. Republican Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Cleland decisively.
Figuring his career in elective politics is at an end, the 71-year-old Miller has decided not to go quietly into the good Georgia night.
Here's a sample of Miller's sentiments as expressed in ''A National Party No More'':
''And so, Mr. Miller went to Washington. I wish I could say the experience has been like Jimmy Stewart's 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.' ... Unfortunately, what I discovered in Washington was truth, and truth did not set me free. It filled me with anger on behalf of Americans.''
''The Democratic Party will never nominate a candidate capable of winning nationwide until it abandons the suicidal compulsion of allowing Iowa and New Hampshire to be the tail that always wags the Democratic donkey. New Hampshire is a great state, but a microcosm of America it is not.''
''Because the advocacy groups have come between the Democratic Party and the people, it is no longer a link to most Americans. Each group has become more important than the sum of the whole. It is a national party no more. It is a national party no more. (sic) So, bang the drum slowly, and play the fife lowly, for the sun is setting over a waiting grave.''
Griffin Bell, President Jimmy Carter's Democratic attorney general, has written the foreword for the book.
When broadcast blowhards such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly assail the Democratic Party, most of us ignore them. But when a Southern pillar of Democratic politics writes his party's obituary, a scary thought comes to mind: We may be left with a one-party national government. And that is not a good thing, no matter which team is in absolute control.
Oh, please, the Democrats are in nowhere near as bad a shape as the Republicans were throughout the 1970s.
They will be after they drink the Dean Kool-Aid.
Come to think of it, both those guys are probably more like moderate Republicans today than a typical democrat.
Talk about delusional! Step right up, Demmycrats! Fresh Kool-Aid right here!
Boy, that's for sure. Especially now that the Republicrats have devolved into just another Big Stupid Government parasite party.
Unfortunately, if the Dems did fall off the end of the earth, it would be the Greens that replaced them.
"Oh, please, the Democrats are in nowhere near as bad a shape as the Republicans were throughout the 1970s."
The columnist's concerns are unduly apocryphal, to be sure.
And your assertion is true...on one level. Certainly, there are more Democrat seats in Congress and more self-styled Democrats among voters today than there were Republicans in the seventies.
But, on another level, the Democrats are in desperate shape compared to the Republicans in the seventies. The Republicans, at least, had a coherent philosophy to build on and ideas that were worthy of support.
Today's Democrats have no such guiding philosophy and are totally devoid of ideas. Unless you want to call pro-abortion, pro-gay, pro-racism, pro-gun control, anti-Bushism, anti-conservatism and anti-Americanism "ideas". As such, the party is a shell that could collapse upon itself as rapidly and as completely as Communism did in the late eighties.
Come to think of it, Democrats and Communism is a pretty apt analogy...
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