What the Zell is wrong with you, Miller?

Thank you Ed Kilgore. He finally answered the riddle to me on why Zell decided to out Republican the GOP: he hates Washington. This ol' boy from Georgia feels like he is being talked down to all the time, and doesn't like is more liberal party-mates from the likes of San Francisco.

Kilgore, then-Gov. Miller's federal-state relations director from 1992 to 1994, certainly knows the man of which he speaks when he reviews his book in this month's Blueprint, a rag that let me get a byline or two.

"Sadly, Miller's perverse and premature endorsement of Bush, and his adoption by the right-wing media machine, will all but guarantee that few if any Democrats will pay attention to the nuggets of sound advice he offers his party. Most of the book simply warns Democrats that they cannot remain competitive in the South if they abandon traditional party commitments to mainstream cultural views and to the economic aspirations of the middle class. He repeatedly praises the Democratic Leadership Council for offering the right advice to Democrats, even as he endorses Bush administration positions on economic, fiscal, and foreign policies that the DLC consistently opposes. At a time when centrist Democrats are fighting insidious claims that its positions are no more than Bush Lite, Miller offers Bush Heavy as an alternative."

The real question this book doesn't answer then is, why did Zell become a Senator if every time he went to DC, as Ed claims, he got all tense and defensive? His sense of duty to the party? And since not all democrats are not New Democrats, Zell thought: 'to hell will ya'll' and let the right-wing pander start.

"In the first chapter of A National Party No More, Miller compares himself to Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith, and sadly says: 'What I discovered in Washington was truth, and truth did not set me free. It simply made me mad.'

That's vintage Zell, but he's got it backward: He came to Washington and got mad, and his anger has bent him against the real truth, and driven him into the arms of people with little but contempt for his old-fashioned Democratic values. "