Posted on 11/07/2003 5:51:40 PM PST by nickcarraway
From "A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat" by Zell Miller. Stroud & Hall Publishers, Atlanta. Copyright 2003, Zell Miller.
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Every Tuesday while the U.S. Senate is in session, the members of each party meet in a luncheon caucus to plan for the coming week, discuss strategy and dog-cuss the other party. The Democratic senators meet in an ornate room just a few feet outside the Senate Chamber, in what is known as the Lyndon Baines Johnson room.
It was in this room that the great majority leader moved his office in 1959 and liked it so well that he kept it when he became vice president. It remained his office until he became president in 1963. The room, originally planned as the Senate library, is elaborately decorated with elegant fresco murals on the ceiling and walls designed by Constantino Brumidi, the great Italian artist who did the Capitol's rotunda.
A huge crystal chandelier dominates the room. Over in one corner, a big wooden box about three feet deep, eight feet wide and 12 feet high served as LBJ's toilet because he didn't want to go out into the hallway to go to the restroom and be buttonholed by tourists and hangers-on. Not a modest man, Johnson would often take phone calls and dictate letters while sitting on the john. Today, a bronze plaque and a Norman Rockwell portrait of LBJ adorn one wall.
The luncheons begin at 12:30 and usually last until 2. We sat at tables of eight and the food was from the Senate dining room, one floor below. I usually had a bowl of soup, chicken salad with a couple slices of cantaloupe and a slice of chocolate cake. It was good food and most senators are hearty eaters, even the female members.
The first few meetings I blinked to make sure this was really happening to me because I was in awe of these larger-than-life personalities. I was in high cotton, as we say in the South.
Just a few months earlier I had been teaching my Emory University students about the courageous leadership Ernest "Fritz" Hollings had given South Carolina during desegregation. Now I was sitting at the same table with this distinguished statesman. White-haired, tall and erect as a ramrod at more than 80 years old, he looked exactly like a senator should. His low-country, Charleston accent is about as thick as my mountain twang, and sometimes his words are so sharp they can almost draw blood.
. . . Just as you can disagree with people with whom you feel kinship, the opposite is also true. I have little in common with Ted Kennedy, but ended up in 2002 co-sponsoring a prescription drug bill with him and Bob Graham. History will judge this passionate man as one of the all-time great senators, and I respect immensely his work ethic and his tenacity. He also likes dogs, and that will pretty much endear anyone to me. He has a big black water spaniel named Splash that he used to take for a walk around the Hill until Splash took a code orange alert warning a little too seriously and bit a maintenance man working in the senator's office. After that, I didn't see Splash very much.
Dianne Feinstein is as elegant and gracious in person as she is on television. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, the youngest woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate, I find to be independent, savvy and gutsy. She gives me advice on Labrador dogs growing old, and I give her advice on sons growing up. Of course, I felt close to the former Democratic governors with whom I had served -- Evan Bayh, Tom Carper, Ben Nelson.
But Lord, those current presidential candidates in my party! They are good, smart and able folks, but if I decided to follow any one of them down their road, I'd have to keep my left-turn signal blinking and burning brightly all the way. All left turns may work on the racetrack, but it is pulling our party in a dangerous direction.
Whenever the candidates encounter a political action committee group, they preen and flex their six-pack abs for "the Groups" like body builders in a Mr. Universe contest. Or, perhaps more appropriately, I should compare them to streetwalkers in skimpy halters and hot pants plying their age-old trade for the fat wallets on K Street.
Just look at them. They are convinced most Americans will like what they see: John Edwards, shooting brightly through the skies like Halley's Comet. Joe Lieberman, steadily and surely plodding along, one labored step at a time, like Aesop's tortoise. John Kerry, the new century's Abraham Lincoln, posing for Vogue in an electric blue wet suit with a surfboard tucked up under his arm like a rail just split. It made me wonder, are there more surfboards or shotguns in America? There's also Howard Dean of Vermont, with whom I served as lieutenant governor and governor. Clever and glib, but deep this Vermont pond is not.
I watched both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton up close in the early days of their campaigns, so I can recognize that familiar overdrive, that on-the-make-ambitious-to-be mind-set that all politicians have to varying degrees. With presidential hopefuls, it is multiplied many times over. They even come to have a certain kind of body odor that is all their own. Political groupies call it aura.
My best friend, former Congressman Ed Jenkins, had told me I would be impressed with Tom Daschle, with whom he had served in the House. I was, although the leader did seem a little puzzled when I told a reporter he was "as tough as a pine knot" and the reporter wrote "as tough as a pine nut." Back in Georgia, an accurate quote of this old saying would have been considered a great compliment; in Washington it came out as if he were a condiment one could put on a salad.
In fact, they are all good people. They are decent, hard-working and smart. They have been friendly and more than fair to me, even with my rough edges and strong opinions. Let that be underlined: Senate Democrats have been much nicer to me than I have either deserved or expected. But let this also be clear: I will not be bland in what I write, for I am not blind to what I see.
What I saw gradually drew back the curtain on Washington's political stage and over time my awe turned to shock, the Capitol's own version of shock and awe. I began to refer to the Tuesday meetings as the "TUMS-days" lunches as the ideology moved further and further to the left and the oratory was turned up to a decibel level that got so shrill for my old ears that I needed Tylenol to go along with my antacid.
"The Groups" and money. Money and "the Groups." It was like a bad song you can't get out of your mind. I remember once we were urged over and over to attend a fund-raising breakfast because a big labor union was going to give the party $20,000 for every senator in attendance. All 50 of us answering "present" could mean a million dollars for the party. Of course, I attended.
. . . Not long after I arrived in the Senate, I was sitting at my beautiful old mahogany desk in the Senate chamber, a desk, by the way, that has the names Russell, Talmadge and Nunn carved in it. I was sitting there, probably frowning, when Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware spotted me. He's been in the Senate 30 years, and he came over and sat down and said, "I've watched a lot of you former governors come up here and invariably you go through three phases (like a person grieving over a death, I suppose)."
"The first phase is disbelief. You just can't believe how legislation and decisions are made." He was right. I arrived in the Senate in the middle of the appropriations process, and I could not believe the feeding frenzy.
"The next phase," he said, "is anger. You stay mad most of the time and you want to change the system and make it more orderly."
And then, finally, he said the third phase is "acceptance." I have not reached that third phase yet. Not even close. I'm still angry because of the petty partisanship on both sides of the aisle.
I'm angry because of the thoughtless and needless waste of taxpayers' hard-earned money. Angry because soft money -- big money -- from special interests to both parties controls things in a way that is nothing short of bribery. Angry that this money pays for cynical consultants who sneeringly brag, "We do campaigns; we don't do government."
I'm angry at a process in which 59 votes out of 100 cannot pass a bill because 41 votes out of 100 can defeat it. Explain that to Joe Six-Pack at the Kmart.
In recent years, the process has become so politicized and so polarized and so ingrained that we cannot even put it aside in time of war. It is a system that "Cuisinarts" individual thought into a mushy party pudding -- a system that expects one to go along with the team, even if the quarterback is calling the wrong signals.
One of these days, someone smarter and younger and more articulate than I is going to get through to the American people just how really messed up the federal government has become. And when that happens, the American people are going to rise up like that football crowd in Cleveland and run both teams off the field.
. . . I've always thought the most important decision any officeholder makes is whom it is they really want to help. In that regard, in fall 2002, in the heat of a campaign season, the Democratic leadership laid on the straw that broke this old camel's back. It was the caucus position on homeland security.
What came to be the main point of contention was whether any of the 170,000 employees of the new Department of Homeland Security could be moved around by the president in time of national emergency without all the hidebound restrictions of the Civil Service System complicating and delaying it.
Every president before George W. Bush had that kind of authority, but because 2002 was an election year, the employees' labor union wanted to flex its muscle. They found a willing chairman in presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, whose Government Operations Committee had written the bill. The bill was driven by the American Federation of Government Employees and their cock-of-the-walk-president Bobby Harnage, who is always spoiling for a fight because, whether he wins it or not, the fight always helps to increase the 37.5 percent of government workers who are unionized.
Their twin group, AFSCME, by the way, helped bring the state government of California to its knees. If allowed to continue unchecked and unchallenged, they will put the federal government in the same position.
In a floor speech on Sept. 18, seven weeks before the general election and at a time when Max Cleland led 54 to 33 percent in the polls, I told the Senate:
"Mr. President, let no one forget that this debate on homeland security is being held in the shadows of the fallen towers of the World Trade Center. . . . So, how does the United States Senate meet this one of the greatest challenges of our time? I'll tell you. We talk and talk and talk. Then we pause to go out on the steps of the Capitol to sing 'God Bless America"' with our best profile to the camera. And then we come back inside and show our worst profile to the country."
The next day in a press conference, I tried again:
"Of all the many things for my party to have a knock-down, drag-out fight over, the issue of national security is absolutely the worst. I can think of a no more unattractive picture our party could have projected six weeks out from an election. We are not doing our party any good by feeding the perception that Democrats are undermining the president of the United States on terrorism. And to Joe Six-Pack in that Wal-Mart parking lot, that's exactly what we're doing."
I then brought my finger across my neck and said, "We're slitting our own throats." A week later I tried again, with one more plea.
"Have we lost our minds? Do you really want to face the voters with this position, this vote writ large on your forehead, like a scarlet letter? . . . The Senate's refusal to grant this president and future presidents the same power that four previous presidents have had will haunt the Democratic Party worse than Marley's ghost haunted Ebenezer Scrooge."
On election night, Nov. 5, a ghost even scarier than Marley appeared in Georgia and in Missouri. As I had warned, this one did slit throats. Triple amputee and decorated Vietnam hero Max Cleland was defeated, dropping eight points in those few weeks -- weeks that time and time again, 11 to be exact, the Senate Democratic leadership urged him to vote with those special interests. And in Missouri, Jean Carnahan, a fine senator and widow of my friend, Mel Carnahan, met the same fate.
Immediately after the election, the bill passed with the Democrats not saying the first word about protectionism for union and federal employees, which weeks before they had dwelled on. After the election the issue was not even mentioned. It had all been just politics by and for "the Groups" before the election. And, then and there, I decided I would never attend another Democratic caucus lunch on TUMS-days. I had seen and heard enough.
They were able and decent folks and they had been good to me, but, with the exception of only a handful, these Democrats went too far to the left for me.
I could not help remembering John F. Kennedy's prophetic warning years before about "party unity" and "what sins have been committed in its name." And then Kennedy's warning, "The party which, in its drive for unity, discipline and success ever decides to exclude new ideas, independent conduct or insurgent members, is in danger."
He probably uses it as a babe magnet. If they're looking at the dog, they're not looking at him.
Mary Jo might not appreciate the irony.
Kennedy is, was, and has always been a stupid drunken ass.
With that being said, Saxby Chambliss is not much better.
IMHO, the Republican Party in Georgia died along with Paul Coverdell. What a fine man he was. We will miss him always.
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