Zell Miller, Unhinged?

Zell Miller has been making a lot of news lately. It was just a few months ago that he was praising John Kerry in all sorts of ways, but now he is famous for a harsh attack on John Kerry specifically and liberals generally. That, however, is not the news: what's news is the idea that some have that this will undermine the Republican chances.

Andrew Sullivan is a good (because he’s a conservative) example of this conclusion:

Zell Miller's address will, I think, go down as a critical moment in this campaign, and maybe in the history of the Republican party. I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats' keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift. Then you see Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed among the Democrats. Remember who this man is: once a proud supporter of racial segregation, a man who lambasted LBJ for selling his soul to the negroes. His speech tonight was in this vein, a classic Dixiecrat speech, jammed with bald lies, straw men, and hateful rhetoric. As an immigrant to this country and as someone who has been to many Southern states and enjoyed astonishing hospitality and warmth and sophistication, I long dismissed some of the Northern stereotypes about the South. But Miller did his best to revive them. The man's speech was not merely crude; it added whole universes to the word crude.

He also explains what was wrong with Miller’s speech:

Miller has absolutely every right to lambaste John Kerry's record on defense in the Senate. It's ripe for criticism, and, for my part, I disagree with almost all of it (and as a pro-Reagan, pro-Contra, pro-SDI, pro-Gulf War conservative, I find Kerry's record deeply troubling). But that doesn't mean he's a traitor or hates America's troops or believes that the U.S. is responsible for global terror. And the attempt to say so is a despicable attempt to smear someone's very patriotism.

Appealing to the crudest form of patriotism and the easiest smears is wrong when it is performed by the lying Michael Moore and it is wrong when it is spat out by Zell Miller. Last night was therefore a revealing night for me. I watched a Democrat at a GOP Convention convince me that I could never be a Republican. If they wheel out lying, angry old men like this as their keynote, I'll take Obama. Any day.

Evidently, though, the speech wasn’t the only thing of Miller’s that is worth talking about. His performance off-stage is just as strange, according to Bart Acocella:

Three times on CNN, Zell was speechless when confronted with the fact that Dick Cheney, as either a House member or as the Secretary of Defense, opposed many of the same weapons systems Miller excoriated Kerry for opposing. (Wolf Blitzer in particular brought some cred to the table as the Pentagon correspondent during Cheney’s tenure there, and he wasn’t shy about flashing those credentials).

On the occupier/liberator riff, Greenfield noted the President himself has frequently spoken of the “occupation” in Iraq. Miller: “I don’t know about that.” Asked about his praise for John Kerry in 2001, he lamely – lamely! – replied that he was merely parroting the biographical sketch given to him by Kerry’s office.

But the real smackdown came on Hardball. ... The whole premise of Matthews’ questioning was essentially this: Isn’t it misleading to parse out Kerry’s voting record? Isn’t it too easy to find an incriminating up-or-down vote when some of these bills contain many – often unrelated -- provisions? Matthews added that it works the other way too, as Democrats have unfairly taken out of context Republican votes on spending bills and held them up as evidence that the GOP wants to starve poor children.

Zell didn’t like that. “I didn’t say anything about not feeding poor kids!” he scowled and thundered. This was about the time it got wacky. Without provocation, Miller snapped: “I wish I was over there where I could get a little closer in your face. I wish we lived in the day when you could challenge a person to a duel. Now that would be pretty good.”

“Get out of my face.”

Will this sort of thing push people away from voting for Bush? Many liberals seem to think so, but maybe they are hoping so. That’s why I quoted Sullivan above — I don’t think that he can be accused of wishful thinking. He’s a conservative who has grown less trusting of Bush and he is being pushed away by this sort of thing. It is worth noting, however, that “this sort of thing” plays very well to some as TalkLeft explains:

The mock jury on msnbc loved Zell Miller's speech. One called it "uplifting and optimistic." They said he had more credibility because he was a democrat. Only one person said he was overboard. If this represents voters in general, this country is in big trouble. The war machine is here to stay.

There is also the issue of the increasing militarization of the discourse coming from the Republican Party, as Joshua Marshall explains:

I’ve been listening closely to the way these speakers talk about war – its immanence and ever-presence, often in ways that don’t jump out at you. In his speech on Monday Sen. George Allen --- current head of the Republicans’ Senate campaign committee --- called this election “the most important since 1980” and then went on to describe this one and that one both as “elections decided in the midst of war.”

The ‘war’ he was talking about for 1980, of course, was the Cold War. But the tenor of the comparison to me had an ominous feel, a retrospective redefinition of the past aimed at making war seem like a permanent, ever-present condition.

Was 1980 a war-time election? I don’t think most people at the time would have said so. Indeed, I think that’s an understatement. Was national security a major issue? Yes. But an election decided in time of war? 1980 was a peacetime election. 1968 and 1972 might fairly be called wartime elections. 1944 was definitely a wartime election. Not 1980.

This whole confab has been built around militarism, the seductions of the mentality of seige and insecurity both from without and within, and the sort of no-rules-win-at-all-costs-lie-if-it-works mentality that will lead this nation to grief.

Very disturbing indeed...

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• 2004 Elections
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• George W. Bush
• John Kerry
• War on Terrorism