Zell

Well, he was a crazy old coot, but he was our crazy old coot until George Bush happened along.

Zell Miller understood the redneck soul better than anyone else in Georgia - the suspicion that the educated are secretly laughing, the devotion to Jesus as the end of all knowledge and inquiry, the sense of entitlement and victimhood, the belief that the black man is now on top and is still not satisfied, the harsh judgments and desire to punish the unpatriotic and skeptical, and above all, the love of guns as the solution to their problems.

To his credit and unlike the blow dried evangelical politicians of this day, he spent most of his life offering leadership to the regular folk to help make their lives better. He knew this was best done carefully and without seeming to know their best interests better than they did.  Zell had passion and yet he was not a demagogue. Oh, he knew to throw the lions a pagan or two for the amusement of the mob, but he did not come down heavily on hate. 

So, with Zell, we had a redneck who saw that suspicion of the African, the immigrant, the press, the feminists, the professors, and anyone who was strange or different was keeping his people in bondage. The Hope Scholarship was one of the singular achievements of any governor anywhere in the 20^th century. At first, if you kept a B average, you could go to a state college in Georgia for free. (If you could not keep a B average at most high schools, you did not belong in college.) The benefits have deteriorated because of costs and Republicans, but you can still get most of your college paid for and the elite Zell Miller Scholarship for the very best students pays full freight. 

Stacey Evans is a notable woman who ran for governor who was from very poor circumstances in the North Georgia Mountains. In her campaign she said she would never have gone to college without the Hope. Zell wanted young people who had disadvantaged childhoods like his to be given opportunities he never had. This was a profound expression of the ideals of Thomas Jeferson. Get rid of the caste system and give bright children no matter their circumstances a chance to rise - really the best argument for Liberalism.

His fight to get the Confederate battle flag off the State Flag (it was added only in 1956 in response to Brown v. The Board of Education) was admirable and a profile in courage, unthinkable today and it almost cost him the governorship. Only the enormous goodwill he had built up saved him from electoral defeat. Zell was raised in the mountains where there were almost no black people, but he had the vision to see that a dynamic culture and economy was one that was only biased on the basis of merit and nothing else.

His nomination to the Senate by Governor Barnes was his downfall.  He hated it there and Roy made a mistake by not appointing Buddy Darden who would have been a very effective Southern moderate Senator. In addition, there was George Bush.

 While most of us Democrats saw George Bush as a shallow, intellectually lazy, malleable, trust fund ex-coke head with a mean streak who never should have quit drinking, Zell saw him as the ideal man, perhaps the man he had always wished to be. What Zell never seemed to get is that if George told him he was going to pick him up to play golf, he was not really going to show up. Zell knew some people laughed at his accent, his crudeness, his poor beginnings. No one would ever laugh at George Bush for these things. George knew where the salad fork went.

So, we have the spectacle of the Senator from Georgia challenging journalist Chris Matthews to a duel, veins popping, eyes crazed and for some reason pronouncing metaphor as “metifer.” This was right after he gave his keynote speech to the Republican National Convention (twelve years after he gave the keynote speech in support of the nomination of Bill Clinton at the Democratic National Convention.)  The Republicans used him with glee and many Northerners saw him as a caricature of the South. It was embarrassing.

I want to write down these thoughts before we all pass from the scene because Zell was an intelligent, tough, and shrewd figure who long served this state and its people. He had rare courage and he was one of the best governors Georgia ever had.  

I hope that history recognizes that he was not a clown, and he was not an ignorant man, despite the sad spectacle of his performance at the Republican Convention.