When the Senate voted 51 to 50 to provisionally accept the outline of George W. Bush's budget, the sole Democrat who crossed the aisle was Zell Miller of Georgia. (He was offset by Republican Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, with Vice President Dick Cheney breaking the tie.)
Of all the wavering Democrats in the Senate today, Miller is the mostdifficult to figure out. Official Washington expected John Breaux to be thepresident's favorite Democrat, yet the Louisiana senator has resisted Bush'stax-cutting entreaties. Democrats may get heartburn when they see a Max Baucus, aMax Cleland, or a Mary Landrieu hedging bets on some White House initiative; butthese are senators with lukewarm popularity who face heavily pro-Bush electoratesin 18 months, so their reasoning is hardly obscure.
Yet none of this describes or explains the recent behavior of Zell Miller, theformer Georgia governor who left office in 1999 as the most popular governor inthe country. Miller was appointed to the Senate after the death of Paul Coverdelland won the seat in his own right last November. The still popular Miller canprobably keep the seat as long as he wants it--but people are unsure whether ornot he'll seek another term in 2004. So Democrats have little to threaten orpromise that might bring him back to the party.
No matter how you slice it, Occam's razor provides no parsimonious explanationfor why Miller decided to co-sponsor the Senate's version of the president'stax-cut package and to buck his party on numerous other fronts over the past twomonths. Indeed, that lack of a clear political motive is exactly what hasDemocrats so spooked. Miller is known for having sensitive political antennae. Ifhe came out for Bush's bill, wouldn't other centrists follow? Happily for theDemocrats, no one else has done so. But that only makes the mystery of hisdefection more perplexing.
The greatest bewilderment and resentment comes from the coterie of politicalconsultants Miller drew around him during his 1990 gubernatorial race, mostnotably James Carville. Together with Carville and Paul Begala, Miller honed apolitical formula that his two campaign advisers would use to pave Bill Clinton'sway to the White House two years later. Begala refused any comment for thisarticle. But Carville has been merciless and voluble in his criticism. Hepublicly asked for and received the return of the $1,000 contribution he gave toMiller's 2000 campaign. And when I spoke to him in late March, Carvillespeculated that Miller's apostasy might be rooted in the work he did for PhilipMorris during his hiatus from elective office in 1999 and 2000.
Miller, on the record, replies, "Those folks are full of shit." He insiststhat the now famous political operatives who helped run his 1990 campaign simplylooked at one moment of his 40-year political career and saw what they wanted tosee. "They were just around for the few months of the campaigns," he says. "Theywere never around me for the governing."
It's not just Carville and Begala who are puzzled. A host of other closeassociates and former staffers are similarly unable to provide any explanationfor Miller's course since last November--at least any explanation rooted inpolitics or ideology.One Beltway theory holds that Miller never was much of aprogressive: During his two terms as Georgia's chief executive, he became anaggressive proponent of welfare reform, a tax cutter, and one of the fewgovernors who thought three-strikes anticrime legislation was rather toogenerous. ("If you want three strikes in Georgia," Miller quipped to reporters,"you'd better join a baseball team.")
Before his election to the governorship in 1990, Miller had been rattling aroundGeorgia politics for 30 years, sometimes as a progressive, other times as aright-winger, but always as a Democrat.He hails from the mountainous northernpart of his state, where Georgia meets North Carolina and Tennessee. He got hisnickname, Zigzag Zell, not only for ideological flux and inconstancy but for acertain treacherous attitude toward his own political allies that some observersattribute to his regional heritage.
"His approach has always been to suck a group in," says one longtime Millerwatcher, "and then turn on them at an appropriate time, when there's the widestpossible advantage to him. The unions helped him get elected in 1990. And then he[immediately] picked a fight with them." Trying to explain Miller's actions, saysanother former staffer, "quickly gets [you] into the realm of abnormalpsychology. He's very complicated. There are very few people particularly closeto him. It's that whole mountain thing he has. He's got a limited ability totrust anyone."
Miller's baffling behavior seems to be rooted more in his character and in hispolitical near-death experience when he almost lost his race for re-election in1994. A politician of his stripe--a sometime progressive from the South--survives by staying no more than millimeters in front of or behind the publicmood, and this is no small challenge in a region where crisscrossing pressures ofrace and class politics can make political coalitions inherently unstable. ButMiller let himself be firmly identified on the national stage with the newpolitics he had helped pioneer in Georgia. He wrapped himself in Bill Clinton in1991 and 1992 and then made a morally admirable but politically disastrousdecision to try to remove the confederate symbols from the Georgia state flag.And having gotten out in front with what must have seemed a winning politicalmessage, Miller was left holding the bag as Clinton and his politics becamedesperately unpopular in the South in 1993 and 1994. He felt burned. "You've gota guy who was never terribly enamored with the national party. But that really,really affected him," says one staffer from that time. "He felt the nationalparty and Clinton almost took him down. After that, he wasn't going to have awhole lot to do with them."
Today, Miller is reciprocating. He remains extremely popular in his homestate. Like one of his successful New Democrat predecessors, former Senator SamNunn, Miller has become virtually extra-partisan. His Democratic colleagues inthe Senate are leery about pressing him too hard, because he has little to loseby shifting parties.
Still, the fact remains that Miller's recent actions aren't politicallynecessary. This isn't 1994, and there's not exactly a groundswell of support forthe Bush tax cut,even in the Peach Tree State. And Georgia has actually been apretty good state for Democrats during the past two cycles. So why defect to theRepublicans?
To those who say he is simply trying to protect his right flank, Miller canplausibly point to his titanic popularity in his home state. "I'm 69 years old,"he says only half-jokingly. "I'm not sure I'll even be around when my right flankneeds protecting."
In the end, what drives Miller is less calculation about the ideological mood ofthe electorate than it is some deeper-seated determination not to be a captive ofthe national party. It is precisely this suspicion of the Democratic Party,bordering on resentment, that Miller took from his 1994 race. And in a politicianwho is intuitive, impulsive, and personal rather than basically ideological,resentment can color an entire political outlook.
Everything Miller has done since 1994 has echoed a certain "won't get playedagain" attitude toward the national Democrats. And as his Democratic colleaguesin the Senate seem to realize, it's a stubbornness and orneriness that will onlybecome more embedded and extreme the more they try to push him into line. "TheSenate took a little getting used to," Miller recently told me. "But the more I'min it, the better I like it. And the more people say that I shouldn't be for whatthey're against, the more I am for it. I didn't come here to be a broker.Breaux's the broker. I let the chips fall where they may. I'm not a maker ofdeals. I'm a breaker of deals."
