Miller’s Tale

Chambliss exploited the eleven votes effectively against Cleland, not only in the television spot but in speeches and debates. Sure, the advertisement was tough, Miller told me in an interview, but “politics is tough.” What infuriated Miller more was that Senate Democrats acquiesced on homeland security after the election without “saying the first word about protectionism for union and federal employees, which weeks before they had dwelled on.” Democrats had merely been pandering to pressure groups before the election, Miller says. “Then and there, I decided I would never attend another Democratic caucus lunch.”

For Miller, the Cleland episode epitomizes what has happened to the Democratic party. It has lurched to the left, grown reliant on liberal groups for campaign funds and policy direction, and sacrificed winning elections, notably in the South. That, indeed, is the theme of “A National Party No More,” which is partly an autobiography but mostly a fervent attack on the author’s own party. Miller, who has rejected many Republican invitations to switch parties, says he was “born a Democrat, married a Democrat, elected a Democrat, governed as a Democrat, but not this kind of Democrat”–not a Washington-style uncompromising liberal. Last week, he announced he wouldn’t “entrust” the country to any of the Democratic presidential candidates and instead will back President Bush for reelection in 2004.

Miller’s critique of his party is far more sweeping and angry than the tepid reproaches of centrist groups like the Democratic Leadership Council. Written in a folksy style, studded with rural witticisms and country humor, the book is highly readable. It’s not a heavy policy tome, but brims with political advice, particularly about the South. “Democrats have never seen a snail darter they didn’t want to protect, but sometimes I think the one endangered species they don’t want to save is the Southern conservative Democrat,” Miller writes. “The modern South and rural America are as foreign to our Democratic leaders as some place in Asia or Africa. In fact, they are more so.” Which is why, Miller says, they foolishly forced Cleland to wear his homeland-security votes “around his neck,” like the albatross worn by “the ancient mariner in the Coleridge poem.”

After nearly fifty years in politics, Miller is an old bull, but he’s not from the old school of Southern Democrats. He’s from the mountainous north of Georgia, never a slave-holding region. And Miller was never a segregationist, although he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during an unsuccessful race for Congress that year. He’s ashamed of that now. “I only hope that the totality of my forty-year record since then is proof that they were the words of someone who at that time was a political weakling, but not a racist.” Miller notes wryly: “When I was a young state senator arguing that race should not matter, I was considered a liberal. Now, forty years later, when I am an old U.S. senator and argue that race should not matter, I’m considered a conservative.”

Miller says Republicans have pressure groups, too, but handle them more intelligently. The Democratic groups “are very high maintenance and they want everyone to know they are the tail that wags the dog,” he writes. “The Republican special interest groups, to the contrary, are content to operate under the radar. . . . With them, it’s about winning, not ego or who gets credit.” What matters, Miller says, is “being a mature national party, not a hodgepodge of special interest groups, which undeniably is what the national Democratic Party has become.”

The most touching passage in “A National Party No More” is Miller’s account of how he became a full-throated opponent of legalized abortion. “There was a time, when the question of abortion came up, I automatically answered that a woman should make that decision about her body. . . . But over time I came to realize this is a much more complicated issue than that.” It was the arrival of four great-grandchildren that prompted Miller to change his mind. One Christmas he had an epiphany. “Even though their young parents struggle tremendously to take care of them, I know how richly blessed we are that they were not four of the forty-two million who have been aborted over the past thirty years, that they are alive, a fifth generation to celebrate Christmas” at his home in Georgia. For Miller, the “most poignant sight” at the annual pro-life march in Washington last winter was “the large number of women holding signs saying they regretted their abortions.”

Miller has no expectation Democrats will heed his advice. And he is deeply pessimistic about the party’s future. Some of the Democratic presidential candidates are “treading on dangerous ground” by condemning Bush on Iraq. “They are exacerbating the difficulties of a nation at war. . . . They should stop this, or at least modify it into a more civil discourse.” Frontrunner Howard Dean, Miller says, belongs to the “whining wing of the Democratic party.”

Democrats, like the Whig party in the 1850s, have “become dangerously fragmented, and considering the present leadership it can only get worse,” Miller says.

Satisfying interest groups is more important to Democrats than the party itself. It is neither a rational nor a national party today. “So, bang the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, for the sun is setting over a waiting grave.”

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.