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September 2, 2004
The New York Post
I don't think there's ever been a speech like last night's keynote address by Georgia's Democratic senator, Zell Miller.
First, it's unprecedented for a senator of the opposing party to deliver the most important remarks at a convention besides those of the presidential and vice-presidential nominee. Second, and even more important, it was astonishingly harsh — and harsh about Democrats and the Democratic Party in a way that no major Republican politician would dare to be.
If a Republican said, as Miller just did, that "our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief," he'd sound whiny and defensive at the very least.
It's simple political manners for leaders of one party to allow as how the other guys do mean well, kind of. Zell Miller doesn't need to stand on niceties. He's a lifelong Democrat who came to political prominence when he was propelled into the Georgia governorship in 1990 by the brilliant campaign strategy of a then-unknown Democratic political consultant named James Carville.
Ronald Reagan used to say, more in sorrow than in anger, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me." Zell Miller, still a Democrat, spoke not a syllable in sorrow and spoke thousands of words in anger.
Indeed, an enraged David Gergen dared to compare Miller to Lester Maddox, the segregationist governor for whom Miller worked more than 40 years ago. Gergen said Maddox was "a man of hate," and that Miller was "a man of hate" too.
Well, Miller certainly hates what leading Democrats have been doing and he wants them to pay for it by helping to re-elect George W. Bush.
"What has happened to the party I've spent my life working in?" he said. "I can remember when Democrats believed that it was the duty of America to fight for freedom over tyranny . . . Time after time in our history, in the face of great danger, Democrats and Republicans worked together to ensure that freedom would not falter. But not today. Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator."
Pundits last night screamed that this was simply untrue, and Miller's rhetoric was certainly wildly exaggerated. But it can't be so easily dismissed. Take the views of the two longest-serving Democrats in the U.S. Senate, both of whom are considered heroes by their party.
In a 2003 speech on the Senate floor, Robert Byrd said: "Our emperor says that we are not occupiers, yet we show no inclination to relinquish the country of Iraq to its people."
And as for the idea that U.S. forces are liberators, Sen. Ted Kennedy said earlier this year: "To the people in the Middle East, and too often today, the symbol of America is not the Statue of Liberty, it's the prisoner standing on a box wearing a dark cape and a dark hood on his head, wires attached to his body, afraid that he's going to be electrocuted."
This appears to be a view with which Sen. Kennedy concurs.
Where Miller erred is that Democratic leaders are actually far more moderate and responsible on these matters than, say, the Democratic delegates to last month's Boston convention. Those delegates almost certainly believe that America is an occupier of Iraq rather than a liberator.
And it's important to remember that their folk heroes, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, believed and believe that the war to liberate Afghanistan and rout al Qaeda was nothing more than an imperialist aggression.
Now the question is, How big a deal will Democrats and the media make of this? In their shoes, I'd be careful. Can't they take a little heat from an angry member of their own family?
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
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