The Democrat Republicans love to love

Zell Miller is telling a tale, a parable about a mountaineer, his new bride and their stubborn mule.

The silver-haired senator from Georgia is seated in his office on Capitol Hill, amid small shrines to Mickey Mantle and the U.S. Marine Corps, wearing a charcoal gray suit and shiny black cowboy boots. He has made it his mission lately to torment the Democratic Party, his lifelong political home, and verbally torture John F. Kerry, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

The tale involves a balky mule being hit with a 2-by-4 and ends with the mountaineer threatening his young wife with the same. As Miller grins, having made his point about asserting one’s self, he steals a glance at his chief of staff, a young woman sitting a deferential distance away.

It seems a small concession to the notion that, just maybe, in this age, among a certain set, joking about spousal abuse may not be the most politic thing, funny as the story is. But then the 72-year-old Miller is retiring at the end of his term early next year, and if there are any bridges left standing, it is not for lack of incendiary effort.

He broke with his fellow Democrats from the start of the Bush administration, delivering key votes to install John Ashcroft as attorney general and cosponsoring the president’s first tax cut. He has written a thin, angry book, “A National Party No More,” that depicts the Democratic Party as a mushy-headed, liberal-kowtowing parody of its old self. He has enthusiastically endorsed Bush’s reelection, and taken to appearances like one earlier last month, before Georgia Republicans, where he savaged Kerry as a man “so out of touch with the average American it would be comical if it were not so dangerous.”

His remarks drew an uproarious ovation, not unlike the one that greeted Miller’s paint-blistering keynote speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention where, in the service of Bill Clinton, Miller assailed Bush’s father as a “timid man” and a cosseted millionaire who “just doesn’t get it” when people complained about hard times.

The turnabout has left many longtime friends and political allies sad and angry and, above all, perplexed.

“In the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, nobody labored in the vineyards of the Democratic Party as consistently and loyally, from the national level to the state level, as Zell Miller,” said Keith Mason, who served 10 years ago as staff chief to then-Gov. Miller and still regards him with great affection and appreciation. “That’s why so many Democrats were surprised when he suddenly and consistently supported the president.”

Bobby Kahn, the chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, put it more succinctly: “Something went bad wrong.”

Miller, a mountain man himself, insists he is trying to save the Democratic Party, which in just about a generation has gone from dominating Southern politics to flailing for survival. He offers a simple explanation, the one involving the plank and the thick-headed mule.

“I can’t use a little hickory switch,” Miller says, with an accent as rich and smooth as burled wood. “I haven’t got long. I have to use strong words, or whatever it is, to get my point across. I’m going to be gone, I’m going to be history in just a few months.”

A progressive governor

People of various persuasions agree on one thing: Miller was an extraordinarily accomplished governor. Some call him the best Georgia ever had.

The very model of a Southern progressive, Miller eliminated the state sales tax on food, easing a burden on the poor. He appointed blacks to groundbreaking positions and tried unsuccessfully to remove the Confederate stars-and-bars from the state flag. He reformed the welfare system, stiffened the penalties for drunk driving, advocated a two-strikes-you’re-out policy for violent offenders and instituted boot camps for juvenile lawbreakers.

He was a risk-taker and not one to shrink from fights -- often personally nasty ones -- with members of his own party. (In one famous exchange with state House Leader Tom Murphy, a frustrated Miller referred to the Murphy “mausoleum and cemetery” as the place where legislation died; Murphy said he wished he had a mausoleum and, if he did, guaranteed “there would be another person interred in it.”)

The signature accomplishment of Miller’s eight years in office was creation of a state lottery, with proceeds funding preschool programs, technical training and free tuition for any Georgia college freshman who kept at least a B average in high school. Pushing a lottery in Georgia was a gutsy, controversial move, said Charles Bullock, a political scientist and longtime Miller watcher at the University of Georgia. “He was warned by folks, ‘This is the buckle of the Bible Belt, you can’t go out and endorse gambling,’ but he went ahead, doggedly,” Bullock said.

The lottery barely passed. But the HOPE scholarship program turned out to be a huge success, lifting Miller’s approval ratings to 85%, with equal support from Democrats and Republicans alike. “He’s a remarkably agile, gifted politician,” said Q. Whitfield Ayres, a Republican pollster who has spent much of his career working in Georgia.

The philosophical roots of Miller’s convictions -- self-reliance and giving others the chances he never had -- apparently grew out of the Appalachian hollow where he grew up.

His father died 17 days after Miller was born. His mother, Birdie, built the family’s small stone house with rocks she plucked from a nearby creek. The Millers raised chickens in a corner of the living room, and managed without indoor plumbing until after Zell left for college. The senator still lives in the house, in the mountain hamlet of Young Harris. Obviously, much has changed; for one thing, the old dirt road is now Route 76, a busy, multilane highway that bears Miller’s name.

He is widely revered in Georgia, the way politicians often are once they quit running. But Miller served a long, not always easy apprenticeship in state government, including 16 years as lieutenant governor before winning the top job in 1990. There were several losing campaigns along the way, including a hapless 1980 bid for U.S. Senate, and enough shifting around on positions to acquire the dubious nickname “Zigzag Zell.”

“He’s very good at reading where the public is at any moment in time and being able to trim his sails to the winds,” said Rusty Paul, a former Georgia Republican Party chairman, who nonetheless welcomes Miller’s switch to Bush without questioning its sincerity. “I think he genuinely does believe the national Democratic Party has strayed from its roots,” Paul said.

But now it is Miller, for a change, who accuses his political opponent of slip-sliding around, suggesting Kerry’s moderation in the presidential race is little more than a masquerade. (He waves off his lavish praise of the Massachusetts senator just a few years ago at a Democratic dinner in Atlanta, suggesting Kerry just happened to give a very good, patriotic speech that night.) “He hasn’t got a trace of DLC in his DNA,” Miller scoffs, referring to the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group that has embraced Kerry’s candidacy.

Miller acknowledges his own views have changed over time, including a relatively recent turn against legalized abortion. “I hope I have grown,” the senator says. “Surely to God I’m not the same person that grew up in that small little mountain village.... Of course my views have changed over the years. And America has changed over the years.”

Asked the difference between his evolution and the transformation he sees Kerry attempting, Miller’s gray eyes grow cold and his voice tightens. “I’m not running for anything,” he replies.

Lured from retirement

Miller was happily retired, living in Young Harris with his wife, Shirley, and their two yellow Labs, teaching at the local college, when Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes came calling back in 2000. The state’s Republican senator, Paul Coverdell, had died suddenly and Barnes wanted his fellow Democrat to fill the vacancy.

Miller was loath to accept the appointment, having long given up his desire to go to Washington. (He even turned down a dream job to be Navy secretary under Clinton.) Miller told Barnes no, but relented when pressed. It was the old Marine in him, he told reporters. “I have an obligation to give but one response when my governor asks me to serve,” Miller said, “the response that was drilled into me at boot camp in Parris Island: ‘Yes, sir!’ ”

Today, he makes little secret of his disgust for Washington and most of the left-leaning Democrats who dominate the party on Capitol Hill. “There have been times, especially my first couple of years up here, where I wish I would just wake up and it all would have been a dream,” Miller says in a voice redolent with contempt. “But I have come around to now believing that I’m glad I came. It’s been a very instructional process.... I would not have wanted to go to my grave without seeing just how messed up this system is in Washington.”

Like many who arrived before him, Miller acknowledges the difficulty of going from being a hands-on, snap-to-it executive to one of 100 senators slogging through a legislative body meant to run at a glacial pace. He recounted a conversation with fellow Democrat Joseph Biden of Delaware, who approached a glum-looking Miller not long into his term. “You have to go through three stages, I guess kind of like death,” Miller says. “He said the first stage is you can’t believe this place.... The second stage is anger. You want to change it. And then the third stage, finally, you get around to accept it. Well, I haven’t been around long enough to accept it. I’m still in that anger stage Sen. Biden talked about.”

Why Miller chooses to vent that anger against his party is a puzzlement to a great many observers. Some plumb for psychological reasons, saying he craves the attention, or wants to get back at those Democrats who talked him out of his contented retirement. Some say Miller has given voice to a sentiment a lot of Democrats feel -- that the party needs to focus more on the kitchen-table concerns of average Americans -- but taken the argument to a reckless extreme. “He’s gone from the guy who’d like to see his party changed and turned into the guy who’d like to see his party abolished,” said James Carville, the Democratic strategist who helped make Miller governor then, at his behest, helped get Clinton elected president.

Worse perhaps, many Democrats simply dismiss Miller as irrelevant. “If he wanted to get the attention of the party, there are a thousand ways to do that other than endorsing the Republican candidate for president and becoming their attack dog,” said Ed Kilgore, who served as an aide to then-Gov. Miller and now directs policy for the centrist DLC.

“This isn’t having a dialogue with people. This is walking out of the room.”

Miller, who hates being “stretched out on the couch,” says his reasons are both practical and political. It is not he who has changed, the senator insists, but the national Democratic Party. It is no longer the muscular party of Harry Truman, or the tax-cutting party of John F. Kennedy. “What we’ve got now is a bunch of neo-isolationists like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and Howard Dean and the other protesters of the ‘60s that are now raising so much hell,” Miller says. “Their music and their hairstyle and their clothes may have changed, but it’s the same bunch.”

The obvious question -- why doesn’t Miller just switch parties and become a Republican? -- is easy to answer: The Democratic Party was bred into his bones.

Growing up in the mountains of northern Georgia, one of the few places in the South with a genuine two-party system back then, partisanship was more than just something a person thought about on election day. Democrats shopped at the Democrat-owned filling station, bought their groceries from a Democratic grocer and were expected to date and marry only members of their own party. Same for the Republicans, going all the way back to the Civil War.

“When I meet my maker,” the senator says, “I fully expect my mama and daddy to be somewhere close around. And I want to be able to look at them and say, ‘Hey, I stayed a Democrat.’ ”

It pains him, though, to see old friendships sundered. Carville, for one, asked for his campaign contributions back after Miller came out in favor of Bush’s tax cuts. “That’s part of it, that’s part of the process,” Miller says, picking his words slowly as he peers down between his knees at the carpet. “That’s part of the business.”

Miller is a prideful man, and more than a tad defensive about his humble upbringing. The word “hillbilly” is about the worst thing one can say in his presence; for years he harangued the Atlanta newspaper about running the backwoods “Snuffy Smith” cartoon, until the paper finally ceased. A lover of baseball, NASCAR and country music, Miller is also steeped in literature and classical music, and he laughs when asked about a favorite quotation from Shakespeare. The passage, from “Macbeth,” ponders life’s ephemeral nature.

A short time later, an e-mail arrives from the senator’s chief of staff. “Miller asked me to let you know that while the quote you mentioned is one of his favorites, his all-time favorite is this one from “Hamlet”:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.