Zell's own contradictions are on full display but with a rational explanation, surprisingly blunt or cleverly convoluted to keep support from all, but he basically says his goal is to pass universal health care and massive increases in education spending. And the best way to do that? Give a big fat tax cut to the rich to establish "trust" with the American people, citing the way Kennedy's tax cuts in the early 60s paved the way for Johnson's Great Society.
Give it credit- at the moment, it's an original mix of positions, far more so than the standard neoliberal New Democrat line. Bizarre and living up to his reputation as "ZigZag Zell" but given the always enduring psychodrama that is the South in America, an interesting document of a modern incarnation.
-- Nathan
--------- June 4, 2001 The Democratic Party's Southern Problem By ZELL MILLER
OUNG HARRIS, Ga. - Most people will remember the 2000 presidential election as the closest in modern American history, with one candidate winning the national popular vote and the other securing a razor-thin Electoral College majority - and the presidency - in a contentious recount in the State of Florida.
Democrats in the South will remember something else: Al Gore became only the third Democrat since the Civil War to lose not only every state in the old Confederacy, but two border states as well. George McGovern and Walter Mondale were the others. But they had an excuse: They were crushed in national landslides. They didn't just lose the South. They lost from sea to shining sea.
Mr. Gore's loss was different. He was swept in the South while winning the national vote. Had Mr. Gore won any state in the old Confederacy or one more border state, he would be president today. But it didn't happen. Mr. Gore lost his home state of Tennessee, Bill Clinton's home state of Arkansas and the Democratic bastion of West Virginia. Even Michael Dukakis - hardly a son of the South - didn't manage to lose there.
The campaign in the South was a mess, and it didn't have to happen. There were more Democratic than Republican governors in the region, and the Democrats held a majority of state legislative chambers.
Our party can't let this happen again. And given the demographic changes that determine the makeup of the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, it will happen again if the Democratic Party fails to recover its strength in the South.
In 2004, if we have the exact same popular-vote split between the Democratic and Republican candidates, and if these candidates win the same states, the Electoral College margin for the Republican will get bigger. How much bigger? After reapportionment, the Republican candidate would have a majority in the Electoral College not by four electors, as George W. Bush did in 2000, but by 18.
So what happened in the South last year? Southerners - a decisive number of them - believed the national Democratic Party did not share their values, and they did not trust the national party with their money.
What can be done about this grievous situation? Let me tell a little story. When I was running for re- election as governor of Georgia in 1994, there were some who argued I should change my position on guns. Poll after poll came back showing that most Georgians favored various forms of gun control - or so it looked on the surface. But in the South, there's always a lot under the surface.
I decided to ask voters something else about gun control. I asked them if they agreed or disagreed with this statement: "Whenever I hear politicians talking about gun control, it makes me wonder if they understand my values or my way of life." You know how many agreed? Seventy- three percent!
For a politician in the South, gun control is not just about guns. Gun control - along with a whole bunch of other issues - is about values. What you are for says a lot about who you are and who you aren't. If Southern voters ever start to think you don't understand them - or even worse, much worse, if they think you look down on them - they will never vote for you. Folks in the South have a simple way of saying this: "He's not one of us." And when a politician hears these words, he's already dead.
I've had personal experience with this kind of issue. As some may know, I tried very hard as governor in 1993 to go back to the state flag that flew over Georgia during my childhood - before militant segregationists replaced our flag with a more Confederate image in the 1950's, in defiance of the civil rights movement and federal demands for desegregation.
I got beaten like a drum in the Georgia General Assembly. I now know why: Many white Georgians who harbored no racist feelings viewed efforts to remove Confederate symbols as a submission to the outside forces of "political correctness." It was as though they were being looked down upon and told to hide our history - even, in a particular and painful way, to hide themselves - to avoid antagonizing interest groups or embarrassing investors or tourists. That was under the surface. (To his credit, our present governor, Roy Barnes, was able to make the change.)
The point I'm making is that for Southern voters, the issues you choose to talk about - or not talk about - are as important as the positions you take on those issues. Southern voters may say they're for gun control, and they may well be for gun control, but they simply don't trust anybody who spends too much time talking about it. Bill Clinton understood that. Al Gore did not.
Such questions of values, for Southerners, are related to the questions of money and trust. Recently, our party leaders seemed to think that the choice was between cutting taxes and controlling spending on the one side and enacting the Democratic agenda on the other. I disagreed. Long experience in government had taught me that if you don't look and act as if you are serious with the people's money, they won't trust you with any more of it. And why should they?
We have a surplus, a big one. Many in my own party wanted to spend it on some important things. But I thought we also had a deficit to pay down: Not a deficit of money, but a deficit of trust.
Someday, I believe, our nation must spend more on some very specific things, like universal access to health care and giving every child all the education he or she can handle. But until we pay down the trust deficit, we will never get these things done. The American people - especially in my native South - won't let us.
There was a time - and it wasn't long ago - when the leaders of my party understood both the policy and political value of cutting taxes. The Kennedy-Johnson tax bill in 1964 cut all tax brackets, including the top tax bracket. It was passed by an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress as part of an aggressive agenda that, within a year, included the creation of Medicare - the most significant health-care initiative in American history.
And how did opponents attack the Kennedy-Johnson proposal? As fiscally irresponsible because it didn't pay off the debt. As a quick fix. And who was attacking these tax cuts back then? Republicans!
It was a political fiasco. The Republicans would not gain control of either the House or the Senate for a generation, and not until they had reversed their party's position on cutting taxes.
I know from personal experience that you can be a Democrat and have a solid Democratic agenda while cutting taxes and holding the line on spending. When I was governor of Georgia, we cut taxes by a billion dollars, reduced spending and cut personnel.
That was why I was able to raise the salaries of university professors and public school teachers and get a lottery passed by the voters in this Bible-belt state. Then we provided pre-kindergarten education for every single 4-year-old in the state; technical training for every high-school graduate; and the HOPE Scholarship, which gives every Georgia student who has a B average, and maintains it, a tuition-free college education. Every one.
But if the people in my state hadn't trusted the government with their money - if we hadn't simultaneously cut taxes and controlled spending - our massive education plan would have fallen apart or been taken apart.
We Democrats can have an aggressive agenda for America. But we need to remember that talking about an agenda is quite different from getting it done. For us to get it done, the people we serve have to trust us. And right now not enough of them do, especially in the South.
Zell Miller is a Democratic senator from Georgia.