American politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular soon will lose one of their more colorful voices in Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia. Miller is a well-combed, tough-talking Southern politician who has built his reputation in Washington by tearing down his own house.
Miller was appointed to his Senate seat in July 2000 after serving as a popular two-term governor. Since his arrival, he has tried to burnish an image as president of the South. He talks about his love of the military and how the Marine Corps saved and shaped his life. He talks of the joys of baseball and the joys of hunting. You can imagine that the radio in the truck is turned to NASCAR every weekend.
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He argues that most other Democrats (read: Northerners) need language training. They don’t realize that talk of gun control is, to the Southern ear, no less than a frontal challenge on a way of life, that taxes are death and that war is sometimes the only answer.
Open his Web page and see Miller on his porch in rural Young Harris, Ga., wearing boots, bluejeans and an open-collar shirt. He’s sitting on the steps next to his two labs, Gus, wearing a red collar, and Woodrow, wearing a blue one. His clear message: “I can out-Bubba anyone.”
The dog collars are a convenient metaphor for what Miller sees as a systemic problem with his party. Most Democrats know how to run for president of Blue State America, those states in the North, Midwest and West that Al Gore carried in 2000. And few know how to run for president of Red State America, that solid wall of Southern states that voted for George W. Bush.
Miller has announced his retirement, but not without rolling a grenade in the middle of the Democratic tent in the form of a new book in which he outlines an angry bill of particulars against his own party.
“Do you want to write off the fastest-growing one-third of the country?” said Miller, reached in his car between book signings in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Rome, Ga.
What about Gore?
The problem with his argument is that fellow Southerner Al Gore of Tennessee was just one state–pick West Virginia or New Hampshire to name just two–away from proving Miller’s thesis wrong. And when you consider that Gore officially fell just 537 votes short in Florida, which the last time we checked was actually part of the South, an equally powerful case can be made that not only is Miller wrong, but that Democratic candidates might do well to go the opposite way.
“Sure, theoretically you could do that,” Miller said, his voice now rising. “It’s never been done before.” Don’t even get him started on Bill Clinton, Sen. Tom Daschle or Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe, all of whom he dismisses as “so-called national leaders” of the Democrats. “How can you say they are national leaders when they can’t even go into a third of the country without doing more harm than good?”
To be sure, Miller is right that Democrats have a problem in the South. No Democrat who hailed from above the Mason-Dixon Line has won the White House since John F. Kennedy in 1960.
And clearly, some of Miller’s message has somehow gotten through. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean trumpets (especially when he is in the South) his A rating from the National Rifle Association. Dean even reached out to those enlightened Southerners who drive pickups adorned with the Confederate flag emblem, only to be heartily rebuked by Southern Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), among others.
Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts made certain that camera crews trailed him when he went hunting in Iowa–real rifle reports, bagged birds and all.
Not good enough for Miller, not even close. All nine candidates, he said, “in one way or another are all like polkas; they all sound alike, they just have different names.” With his Southern ear, all he hears them say is that they will raise taxes (think Mondale, ’84) or pull out from Iraq (think McGovern, ’72).
A tough fight
But the better question might be: Just what would a Democrat have to do to win in the Old South, and, more important, would it be worth the price?
“If I were in the position of looking at the map, you go where the greatest potential is,” said David Leland, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. “Look at states like West Virginia, Missouri, New Hampshire or even Ohio. Any of those states flipped in the 2000 election would have produced a Democratic victory. It would be a lot easier to win those states than to go down into the Deep South and try to make gains there.”
And Leland points to another factor often ignored in 2000, namely the impact of Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy. Leland pleaded with the Gore campaign in 2000 to put more resources into Ohio, a state he thought was winnable for the vice president. But the Gore campaign had to pour money into Minnesota, Oregon and New Mexico–usually reliably Democratic–largely because of the votes Nader was draining from Gore.
“You take that out of the equation, then you focus your resources and time. I think that is a much better equation for coming up with the numbers you need to win,” Leland said.
Remember Goldwater
Miller’s book, “A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat,” bluntly takes his party to the woodshed. But even its title has echoes of another strong speaker, Barry Goldwater, the original Conscience of a Conservative, and we all know how well he fared in his White House run.
And none of the nine Democrats could count on winning with Miller’s vote anyway. He’s already said he will vote for President Bush.
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