GEORGIA'S EIGHT Republican congressmen huddled for two solid days last week to determine whether any of them was crazy enough to risk his seat to challenge Zell Miller, newly named to the Senate seat of Paul Coverdell, who died of a brain hemorrhage on July 18. What two weeks ago looked like winning back one of the safest of Republican seats now looks like a suicide mission.
Miller, a four-term lieutenant-governor and two-term governor, is the most popular Georgia politician of modern times. He's had his ups and downs and backs and forths -- his opponents still call him Zigzag Zell. But that zigging and zagging comes from a political savvy that is Clintonesque in its sophistication. Miller, 68, who had been teaching college in his hometown of Young Harris, claimed he was taking the Senate seat "with a heavy heart." He reportedly ignored "repeated pleas" from governor Roy Barnes and was ultimately swayed only by a phone call from Bill Clinton at the high point of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Believe that and you'll believe anything. Miller is a born politician. Within 48 hours of his appointment he had not just scheduled but held his first fundraiser, and brought in Atlanta lawyer Keith Mason to run his campaign.
If the vagaries of southern politics are your thing, the career of Zell Miller will teach you more than a semester locked up in a library reading V.O. Key. Fresh out of the Marines, Miller began in the early 1960s as executive secretary to segregationist governor Lester Maddox, and took a hard line against spending money to implement federal civil rights acts. He thrived during Jimmy Carter's governorship as executive director of Georgia's Democratic party and made a name for himself two decades later with a campaign (unsuccessful) to get the Confederate Stars-and-Bars removed from Georgia's state flag.
As governor after 1990, Miller proved himself the Newest of New Democrats. He invented the HOPE scholarship, an idea that Bill Clinton borrowed for his presidential campaign (it's a tribute not to the president's hometown but to Miller's skill at devising acronyms -- in this case, Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally). He established boot camp programs for first-time drug offenders, and the nation's only two- (not, mind you, three) strikes-and-you're-out program for violent felons.
How could Miller pay for all this without appearing a tax-and-spend liberal? He was an early proponent of that most palatable tax-and-spend trick: marrying a state lottery to education. Leaving aside the moral issue of lotteries, voters in the South love them. Just look at what happened in the governor's races in two neighboring states in 1998. Democrats Don Siegelman of Alabama and Jim Hodges of South Carolina both used leftish gambling-for-education programs to win blowouts in what are arguably the two most right-wing states in the country.
As Ed Kilgore, chief policy analyst for the Democratic Leadership Council, remarks: "Miller has never given Republicans any chance to take an initiative." Georgia is the only state that has not elected a Republican governor since Reconstruction. It's 28 percent black, and is districted so that its congressional delegation consists of three black Democrats and eight white Republicans. Here as elsewhere in the South, blacks vote almost unanimously for Democrats, and the trick for liberals is to find issues on which to appeal to a third of whites. There's a kind of cornpone cowboy-boot publicity-hound aspect to Zell Miller -- ostentatiously, self-aggrandizingly hokey -- that brings to mind James Carville (who ran his 1990 campaign). He first got elected governor, in 1990, by marrying the black vote to a white base that consisted of his fellow rural North Georgians. He got the expected black landslide and the endorsement of the NRA.
But early in his first term, he changed horses, pushing to get the Confederate colors removed from the Georgia flag, and putting all his eggs into the basket of education. Once Miller survived the disastrous Democratic year of 1994, he was home free. Today, a third of college students in Georgia matriculate without paying tuition, thanks to Miller-administration laws (and financial incentives to grade-inflation, claim Republican foes, since all high school students who keep a B average qualify). Miller's political base is now squarely in Atlanta's growing suburbs. But big business loves him, too. While Democrats bristle at the comparison, Miller, like Sam Nunn, is a master of the particular backroom politics that Tom Wolfe describes in his Atlanta novel A Man in Full, where Black Power and high finance meet.
The more fractious Georgia GOP has never been able to form stable statewide coalitions. Paul Coverdell, conservative but pro-choice, was the only Republican who was able to unite backwoods right-wingers and Atlanta suburbanites. None of Georgia's congressmen thinks himself able to pull this off in a race against Miller. Charlie Norwood, Mac Collins, John Linder, and Nathan Deal ruled themselves out immediately. Once Miller was appointed, Johnny Isakson, the suburban moderate who now holds Newt Gingrich's seat (and who lost to Miller in the 1990 governor's race) bowed out. Saxby Chambliss heeded House speaker Dennis Hastert's worry that Republicans would lose his seat to the well-funded Democratic mayor of Macon if he ran. Jack Kingston was next to pull out, perhaps reckoning that his Savannah base was too isolated for a statewide run. That left Bob Barr, who, thanks to his role in impeachment, has a $ 1.2 million war chest. But Barr has always polled low statewide, and his assaults on Clinton would doom him in the suburbs.
The silver lining for Republicans is that they've avoided a chain reaction whereby several ambitious congressmen, seeking to move up, lose their own seats. But they remain without a candidate. Vulnerable Republican senators would be happy with a first-do-no-harm strategy that would keep the national GOP from blowing money fruitlessly in Georgia. Such a strategy would entail finding a rich Republican -- the Days Inn magnate Clint Day, perhaps, or the Waffle House chain owner Joe Rogers -- to finance his own campaign, and thereby make his bones for a second statewide run, whether for governor or senator, in 2002. As last week ended, former Valujet president Louis Jordan looked ready to step up to the plate in this role.
That didn't make last week any less humiliating. Republican activists were scouring the pot for has-beens. Mack Mattingly, for instance, who preceded Coverdell in the Senate, was less than enthusiastic, and even older than Miller. Businessman Guy Millner had frustrated Republican activists by losing three extremely well-financed campaigns (including the governor's race against Miller in 1994). Ex-attorney general Mike Bowers crashed and burned in the 1998 gubernatorial primary after an adultery scandal. Someone threw Ralph Reed's name into the ring. No Georgia politician of either party took seriously the early rumor that Newt Gingrich might run. But one Republican Senate staffer joked, "If you want to get a call-back from [George W. Bush's campaign in] Austin, leave a message that you've heard a rumor Newt Gingrich is running for Senate on the slogan 'Gingrich and Bush: A Common Vision for America.'"
Does Miller's appointment mean Democrats could now compete for the Senate? With some glaring Republican vulnerabilities (Spencer Abraham in Michigan, Rod Grams in Minnesota, William Roth in Delaware), Democrats think so. The optimistic Democratic view has always been that, if things broke right -- that is, barring any economic downturn and without Gore inflicting a base-deadening boredom on the electorate -- they would pick up 4 to 5 seats. Senate minority leader Tom Daschle is a convert to this view. Last week he begged Al Gore not to choose as his vice-presidential nominee any Democratic senator from a state with a Republican governor. (That would eliminate such hopefuls as Illinois's Dick Durbin, Florida's Bob Graham, and John Kerry of Massachusetts.)
Even cautions observers like Roll Call's Stuart Rothenberg see a Democratic pickup of 2 to 4 seats as likely. And that's only the beginning of the GOP's Senate problems. The 2002 elections, when 20 Republican seats come open, versus only 13 for Democrats, could see further losses. The retirement of Republican conference chairman Connie Mack and the death of conference secretary Coverdell, who was to replace him, deprives the GOP of both leadership and seniority.
Coverdell was Senate liaison to the George W. Bush campaign, and some wonder whether his death could put Georgia into play for the presidential elections. Bush's father, after all, lost the state in 1992. Gore now trails virtually everywhere in the South except Tennessee, but believes he can credibly compete in states where Bush's lead is in single or low double digits: Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina. Since Atlanta is a regional media market that hits a lot of those states, the Miller campaign could prove a rallying point for national Democratic fund-raisers.
By late last week, only one Georgia Republican was gungho to take on Miller: state school superintendent Linda Schrenko. While her position is an elected one, showing she's capable of running statewide, Schrenko has a big problem: She's probably the Georgia Republican who's been the most over-the-moon in praising Miller's education reforms. Another big problem for Schrenko is an inarticulateness bordering on illiteracy. If Coverdell's seat were just abandoned to Democrats, said Schrenko last week, "I think Paul would literally roll over in his grave."
But that can't be true. If Coverdell were capable of literally "rolling over in his grave," the Republicans wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.