Zell Miller: Slate and the Left still just don't understand the South

It’s natural that the Democrats would be angry with Zell Miller. It’s understandable that they would view him as a turn-coat. And their refusal to listen to his argument that they betrayed him, not vice versa, is killing them. Despite regularly losing the entire South, even Vice President Al Gore’s home state, and even if only by a whisker, they still won’t allow themselves to get it.

In Slate, Michael Crowley has an op-ed entitled “Zell Miller: Why the Democratic Senator Loathes Democrats.”

Mr. Crowley begins with

Republicans say their party occupies the mainstream, common-sense political center. The real problem, they argue, is that the Democratic Party has been driven left by monomaniacal special interest groups and the wild-eyed likes of Michael Moore, George Soros, and Whoopi Goldberg. Their favorite piece of evidence? Zell Miller.

Miller is a silver-haired Democratic senator from Georgia who has dedicated the twilight of his long career to excoriating his own party.

That is an absolutely fair accounting of the Republican’s opinion of the Democrat Party. What’s missing from this op-ed and indeed every Lefty op-ed is the question: What if it’s true? After beginning by hitting the nail on the head, Mr. Crowley then goes about the usual weird lefty northeastern/northwestern elite thing of redefining nails and wood so as to deny anything about hammers hitting heads – it’s the other guy!

Nowadays Miller sounds like some kind of right-wing beat poet. Of Democratic values he says: "If this is a national party, sushi is our national dish. If this is a national party, surfboarding has become our national pastime." Of John Kerry: "You can't make a chicken swim, and you can't make John Kerry anything but an out-of-touch ultraliberal from Taxachussetts." National Democrats are "being cannibalized, eaten alive by the special-interest groups with their single-issue constituents who care about their own narrow agenda."…

According to the Republican story, a decade ago the Democratic Party was centrist enough for a Southern conservative like Miller. But in the Dean-Gore-Pelosi-Sharpton-Kerry era, there's just no place for a decent man of values…. This argument amounts to a basic truth wrapped in a major fraud. Democrats have tacked left in recent years (though more in tone than in substance). But Zell Miller has moved, too.

And here is the flaw in his argument:

Far from representing some lonely, abandoned Democratic center, Miller has become a cartoonish GOP partisan.

There is nothing mutually contradictive about those two statements. Zell Miller does represent a lonely, abandoned Democratic center. Why, just look at all the red meat whacko Right positions Senator Miller has endorsed:

… a big Republican tax cut and … leapt forward in support of John Ashcroft's nomination as attorney general…, co-sponsoring Bush's tax cut in the Senate…, supported Bush on virtually every major Senate vote: No Child Left Behind, drilling for oil in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, the Patriot Act, the GOP Homeland Security Department plan, the Iraq war, and a partial-birth abortion ban.

There is nothing surprising about an old-school Southern Democrat voting that way. Southern Democrats used to be conservative, and they used to vote with Republicans all the time. Nowadays, Southern Democrats are called “Republicans”, and Zell Miller is not a cartoon, but a hold-out. No matter what he says his reasons are for not switching parties, I believe his real reason is hope; he refuses to give up hope that his party will come back to its senses.

It’s been a long time since Reconstruction in the Old South. The Democrat Party got about a 120 years’ ride out of southern hatred for carpet-baggin’ Yankees, but things have changed down heyah since 1980. For one, there’s a whole lot more of us “Damn Yankees” than there used to be. (Know what the difference is between a “Damn Yankee” and a “Yankee”? The “Damn Yankees” stay.) Used to be Southerners would do just about anything to piss off a Yankee, but they were only willing to go so far down the Marxist-Feminist-Idiot Trial Lawyer road with the Democrat Party when the Liberal Northeasterners went out of their minds again. Zell would dearly love to put a stake in the heart of the Dean-Gore-Pelosi-Sharpton-Kerry mindset.

Here’s to you, Zell.