For whom Zell tolls: how not to forge the next Democratic coalition - A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat - The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It - Book Review

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Ruy Teixeira

A National Party No more: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat By Zell Miller Stroud and Hall, $26.00

The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It By Stanley B. Greenberg Thomas Dunne Books, $25.95

These two books have a couple of things in common. Both argue that the Democratic Party needs some fundamental changes, and both invoke the spirit of John F. Kennedy. But they diverge sharply in describing where they want the Democratic Party to go. Stanley Greenberg, a prominent Democratic pollster and consultant who helped guide Bill Clinton to victory in 1992, argues that the Democrats are on the verge of a political breakthrough from the stalemate of "the two Americas" They can achieve that breakthrough, he believes, by advocating a bold program which moves toward the "opportunity society" envisioned by John F. Kennedy. But Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), a former Georgia governor and Democratic apostate, argues that his party is on the verge of a complete meltdown and can only save itself by turning drastically to the right and becoming more like, well, JFK--which in Miller's opinion looks much the same as becoming more like Zell Miller. One thing we know for sure: They can't both be right. Let's try to sort it out, starting with the Miller book.

A National Party No More would be a bit easier to discuss if it was entirely a bad book. But it's not. The first quarter or so, which describes Miller's childhood and his rise in Georgia politics, is really interesting. Talk about retail politics: Here's how Miller, then a college professor, first ran for the Georgia State Senate in 1960 at age 28: "I got up before day-break to visit the early-rising mountain families around Owl Creek, Gum Log, Scataway, Bugscuffle, Bearmeat and the other isolated communities throughout the county. I'd be back at the college by nine o'clock to teach my first class. There was an old custom that if you woke up a man at night, it would emphasize to him just how important you thought his vote was. I woke up dozens. I'd always carry a gun on those excursions because feelings ran high and I traveled alone often on dark, lonely, dirt-rutted roads."

But A National Party No More is in most ways a bad book--indeed, a rather dreadful one. Most of the chapters are a toxic combination of corny folkisms, over-the-top jeremiads against fellow Democrats, and wonky recountings of Miller's policy innovations and accomplishments. That makes for some pretty tough slogging, especially given Miller's disjointed prose style, which piles one story or observation on top of another, without a clear narrative structure.

So who would slog through it? Well, probably some of Miller's new-found conservative friends, who would find his observation that "I could probably count on one hand those [environmentalists] in Washington who are real outdoorsmen, the ones who would "know the difference between a pine and a poplar, the ones who have, excuse me, ever 'pee'd' in the woods" a trenchant critique of the environmentalist movement. (One expects that the five leading conservatives who provided dust-jacket blurbs--Sean Hannity, Jack Kemp, Lawrence Kudlow, Newt Gingrich, and Robert Novak--also gave it the old college try.) Who else? Perhaps those among the party he still nominally belongs to who wish to figure how on earth he became the GOP's cat's-paw in the Democratic Party. Back in 1992, after all, Miller was a moderate Southern Democrat who declared, in a keynote speech at that summer's Democratic convention, that Bill Clinton was "the only candidate for president who feels our pain, shares our hopes." Despite a near-loss during the disastrous 1994 elections, he came back to become one of the most popular governors in the country. When he left Georgia's gubernatorial mansion in 1999, Miller's record included both tax cuts and a widely-lauded college scholarship program. But these days, he can't find any reason to support the Democratic Party no matter what--and can't find any reason to criticize the GOP, no matter how outrageous its behavior.

This pattern emerges in full force in chapter 6, "But Not This Kind of Democrat." Here, he blasts his party, for being beholden to "money and the [interest] groups," especially the dreaded labor unions (who backed Miller for governor in 1990), but has nothing to say about Republican ties to business-oriented special interests and business money. Miller is angry that Democrats tried to stop Bush from making some of his appointments because every president "should he able to select his own team," but makes no mention of the GOP's extraordinary efforts to block Clinton's executive and judicial appointments. He is particularly steamed that the Democrats held up President Bush's Homeland Security. bill because of concerns about civil service protections, and not at all concerned that the idea was originally proposed by Democrats only to be blocked for months by Republicans in Congress. (He also mentions in passing that Max Cleland lost his Georgia Senate seat in large part because of political fallout from the congressional fight over the bill, but doesn't mention the truly appalling manner in which the GOP attacked Cleland in that campaign, shamelessly linking the triple-amputee war veteran to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.) Finally, he quotes JFK on the dangers of "party. unity." and "what has been committed in its name," noting Kennedy's warning that "the party, which in its drive for unity, discipline and success decides to exclude new ideas, independent conduct or insurgent members is in danger." Amazingly, he applies this concept to the heterogeneous and not-terribly-united-Democrats rather than the rigidly ideological and disciplined Republicans.