The Jacksonian Persuasion

Until Wednesday night, I was under the impression that Andrew Jackson had died in 1845. But on Wednesday night he appeared at the podium of the Republican National Convention under the guise of Georgia Senator and former Governor Zell Miller. In the accents of the mountain South, with a directness that left his sentiments unmistakable, with a hatred for what he considers betrayal of America and out of a fierce love of family and country Miller delivered the keynote for this Republican convention in the same place as he had delivered one of the keynotes for Bill Clinton’s convention in New York 12 years before.

I watched Miller’s speech from the same spot in the hall as I watched him in 1992. Then I stood next to James Carville, who had worked on Miller’s 1992 campaign for governor and embraced him in the moments after the speech. This time I stood next to Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who wondered how he would be greeted in the Democratic cloakroom, and New Hampshire Senator John Sununu. The 1992 speech was real good. The 2004 speech was electrifying. Zell Miller was a United States Marine—“no better friend, no worse enemy.” You know which side of Zell Miller you want to be on.

First comes family. “Like you,” Miller started off, “I ask which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family?” Andrew Jackson took part in many duels, mostly because of aspersions on his wife’s character. One such adversary aimed away from Jackson who stood unscathed. Calmly, Jackson aimed his gun and shot the man through the heart. David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed describes the diaspora of the Scots Irish from the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland and Ulster in Northern Ireland: these were fighters, proud men and proud women, lusty and loyal, fond of song (think country music) and ever ready to fight to defend their honor. Andrew Jackson was one such. Zell Miller—or Andrew Jackson in his image—is another. You do not want him to think you are a threat to his family.

Zell Miller is, technically, a Democratic colleague of John Kerry in the United States Senate. But in his speech Miller took as dead an aim at Kerry as Jackson did against the man who impugned his wife’s honor and, like Jackson, hit his target. “There is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust [my family’s] future, and his name is George Bush.” And he does not cotton well to politicians who for political reasons call our soliders names.

Miller came to the Senate reluctantly, after Paul Coverdell, a Republican whom he had worked with in the Georgia legislature, died suddenly in July 2000. Governor Roy Barnes had to ask Miller two or three times to accept appointment to the Senate; everyone knew that Miller could win the special election to the rest of Coverdell’s term, because of his popularity as governor, but Miller did not want to serve in Washington and he certainly did not want to be engaged in the hyperpartisan politics of Capitol Hill after achieving great things in the more bipartisan politics of the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta.

Finally Miller agreed to serve, but he was appalled by the partisanship of Tom Daschle’s Democratic Caucus. Since he became Democratic leader in 1994, Daschle has excelled at holding Senate Democrats together and using the rules of the Senate to frustrate the Republican majority from 1995 to 2001 and to frustrate George W. Bush when he became Majority Leader in June 2001. With winks and nods, Senate Democrats and their ultrapartisan staffers prevented Republicans from getting the 60 votes increasingly necessary to get anything through the Senate. Just stick together, Daschle said, and don’t worry about negative fallout; we’ll be protected by the increasingly partisan pro-Democratic Old Media and we can force the other side to give in.

It was a game Zell Miller did not want to play. In December 2000 he went to Austin, Texas, to visit with President-elect George W. Bush, whom he knew from their time as governors together. Miller promised to support Bush’s education bill and volunteered his support of Bush’s tax cut. Daschle, of course, was furious; Miller became a pariah in the unity-conscious Democratic Caucus.

Then came September 11. Daschle rallied to support Bush in September, but by December was holding up the economic stimulus bill by his effective partisan tactics. Then, as the focus shifted toward Iraq, Senate Democrats laid the predicate for undermining Bush’s policies. This Miller evidently identified as something close to treason. And he saw the Senate Democrats rooting against American success. As he said in Madison Square Garden, “Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.” No better friend, no worse enemy.

From there he launched into a harsh attack on today’s Democrats—an attack so harsh that the partisan anti-Republican press would have denounced had it been made by a Republican. “In their warped way of thinking,” he said, “America is not the solution, but the problem”—an echo of former Democrat Jeane Kirkpatrick’s riff in San Francisco 20 years ago that Democrats “always blame America first.” “They claimed Carter’s pacifism would lead to peace. They were wrong. They claimed that Reagan’s defense buildup would lead to war. They were wrong.” Points well taken by the Republican audience. Points that would have come naturally to Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic party.

Miller then followed with a listing of “all the weapons systems that Senator Kerry tried his best to shut down”—and the way that those weapons systems were used in Afghanistan and Iraq—the B-1 bomber, the B-2 bomber, the F-14A Tomcat, the modernized F-14D, the Apache helicopter, the F-15 Eagle, the Patriot missile, the Aegis air defense cruiser, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Trident missile—“against, against, against.” “This is the man who wants to be Commander in Chief of our U.S. Armed Forces?” Miller continued. “U.S. Armed Forces armed with what? Spitballs?”

Miller went on to attack John Kerry’s nuanced vote (cast when Howard Dean was leading him in primary polls) against the $87 billion supplemental appropriation for, among other things, protective body armor for the troops. But his peroration was about character. “George Bush wants to grab terrorists by the throat and not let them go to get a better grip. From John Kerry, they get a "yes-no-maybe" bowl of mush that can only encourage our enemies and confuse our friends. I first got to know George Bush when we served as governors together. I admire this man. I am moved by the respect he shows the first lady, his unabashed love for his parents and his daughters, and the fact that he is unashamed of his belief that God is not indifferent to America. I can identify”—Miller’s autobiography records his youthful carousing—“with someone who has lived that line in ‘Amazing Grace,’ ‘Was blind, but now I see,’ and I like the fact that he's the same man on Saturday night that he is on Sunday morning. He is not a slick talker but he is a straight shooter and, where I come from, deeds mean a lot more than words. I have knocked on the door of this man's soul and found someone home, a God-fearing man with a good heart and a spine of tempered steel.” The other guy, one gathers, is a slick empty suit.

Miller’s speech evoked much louder cheers than the speech of Vice President Dick Cheney which followed. Miller speaks in the sharp accents of the mountain South, as Andrew Jackson probably did; Cheney speaks in the flat accents of the great plains and empty mountain basins of Nebraska and Wyoming where he grew up. But Cheney made many of the same points. His enunciation of the Bush administration’s record on domestic issues was little more than perfunctory; we are waiting for Thursday night when Bush himself will set out (or not) in vivid terms his domestic program for the next four years. His attacks on Kerry were more quietly voiced but just as penetrating as Miller’s. “Time and again Senator Kerry has made the wrong calls on national security.” “Senator Kerry’s liveliest disagreement is with himself. His back-and-forth reflects a habit of indecision, and sends forth a message of indecision. And it is all part of a pattern. . . . Senator Kerry says he sees two Americas. It makes the whole thing mutual”pause here for an explosion of cheers—“America sees two John Kerrys.”

All of this seems likely to be effective stuff for this year’s campaign. But both Miller and Cheney, in their different accents and different ways, took care to put it in historic perspective. Miller recalls that when he was a boy, in a time of national emergency so dire that even boys in Young Harris, Georgia, knew that there were people overseas who wanted to kill us, President Franklin Roosevelt found support from his Republican opponent Wendell Willkie in the 1940 campaign and in the war years that followed. Cheney told how President Harry Truman reshaped American foreign policy in the years after World War II and prosecuted the Cold War and was supported, in the domestically bitter 1948 campaign, by Thomas Dewey, and how Truman’s policies were followed by his successors, Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat John Kennedy.

George W. Bush, prompted by September 11, has reshaped American foreign policy as no president has since Roosevelt and Truman. But, as Miller and Cheney both noted, Bush has not had the support of most of the leading members of the opposition party as Roosevelt and Truman did. The Democrats, drawing on their memories of the Vietnam period, have sought to extract political advantage from setbacks that were far less serious than those encountered by Roosevelt and Truman. Dewey in 1944 did not belittle the campaign in North Africa that Rick Atkinson’s recent book shows was riddled with mistakes, and Dewey in 1948 did not predict defeat and disaster for the Berlin airlift that was ongoing during the campaign and whose success at the time seemed anything but obvious. Dewey and his Republicans in private mistrusted Roosevelt and condescended to Truman, but in public they rooted for American success and refrained from denigrating their efforts.

What a contrast from today—and from the days of the Nixon administration in Vietnam. In the late 1960s and 1970s Democrats who had complacently gone along with Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam decided that Richard Nixon’s deescalation was insufficiently rapid and amounted to—in John Kerry’s words in 1971—a deliberate and systematic engagement in war crimes by American military forces at all levels. In 2003 and 2004 Democratic politicians, infected by their and their staffers’ recollection of their versions of what happened in Vietnam, engaged in systematic denigration of our military efforts in Vietnam. The Democratic convention in Boston seated in President Carter’s box Michael Moore, who called those attacking American forces in Iraq freedom fighters who should and would win. The charge that leading Democrats wish that American forces fail in the hopes that it will help their political chances is well founded.

That is something Andrew Jackson would never stomach. Nor will Zell Miller. Or Dick Cheney. Miller was careful to say that he was attacking not the patriotism but the judgment of John Kerry; the only politicians who have attacked their opponents of unpatriotism this campaign year have been Democrats like Wesley Clark and Howard Dean—both still trotted out regularly as surrogates for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. Miller’s and Cheney’s has been a careful Jacksonianism, mindful of the lesson in Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence that Jacksonianism has been only one of four strains of America’s generally successful foreign policies. The Republican delegates have also cheered for Mead’s Jeffersonianism (human rights and humanitarianism: helping AIDS sufferers in Africa and dissidents in China) and his Wilsonianism (democracy in Iraq and the Middle East; and they are quietly supportive of Mead’s Hamiltonianism (trade and development through global capitalism). But it is Jacksonianism that stirs more American voters, and it was Jacksonianism—in the mountain accents of Zell Miller and the plains accents of Dick Cheney—that was on view at Madison Square Garden Wednesday night.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentar...-9_2_04_MB.html

kick

Zel Miller? He's a "flip-flopper" also isn't he? Hmmm? Looks like a preacher to me :lol: :lol: :lol:

I don't like him..........but thats just me!



Have a fine day :) ...................Andrew Paul(Posted Image)

Old zig-zag Zell melted down on Hardball after the speech. Even right-leaning Chris Matthews couldn't help but point out the lies and hypocrisy in Zell's speech. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5445086 If the Nazis want this senile old jerk, they can have him.

:clap: :clap: :clap: James, I LOVE IT! :D :D :D "Senile old JERK" is right!




Have a good one..........................Andrew Paul(Posted Image)

Yea, Zell went ape shit on Matthews for no reason. The old guy has real problems.

Just so we are clear...

When Zell gave a speech in '92 at the dem convention that was as passionate, he was just telling it like it was.

When Al went crazy and was yelling in his speeches of the past year, he was just telling it like it was.

You all need to pull your pants up, your partisanship is showing. :coolwink: :coolwink:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jonahgo...g20040903.shtml

True, however, Al never has been rude like Zell was to Chris Matthews. I like Matthews and he acted so unprofessional and crazy. Zell actaully told him to shut up and challenged him to a duel. WTF? Matthews wasn't even interupting or anything. Totally unlclassy.

Al never went crazy. Stop repeating Nazi spin points.

There once was a Senator named Zell,
Who some wished would go straight to Hell.
He challenged Matthews to a duel,
Insinuated he was a fool,
And didn't handle himself very well.

Al never went crazy. Stop repeating Nazi spin points.

ok....I retract the crazy part.

hahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:

Anything to say about the rest? I didn't think so.

Al never went crazy. Stop repeating Nazi spin points.

ok....I retract the crazy part.

hahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:

Anything to say about the rest? I didn't think so.

Sorry, forgot to sign in. I am on daughter's computer.

I think this article and his performance on Hardball say enough about zany Zell.

http://fray.slate.msn.com/id/2106119/

Psycho Miller! Qu'est-ce que c'est? He makes those Bush twins look good! by Tamara Baker Sept. 3, 2004 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- Andrew Sullivan -- that's right, Andrew the Barebacking Tory Moralist SULLIVAN -- says it better than I can (http://www.andrewsullivan.com): >>> "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, >>> miling, 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." Sullivan was not the only conservative pundit shaking his head over Miller's speech. David Brooks and David Gergen were openly aghast, talking in stunned voices about how the GOP convention is not about the future, but the past, and how Miller's speech condensed everything about the convention -- and the desires of the Republicans -- into one ugly, hate-filled speech. And this was before Miller challenged Hardball's Chris Matthews to a duel late Wednesday night. No, I did not make that up. Miller, after having the basic underpinnings of his speech debunked by media analysts, totally lost whatever self-restraint he had left and repeatedly challenged Chris Matthews to a duel (http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2004/09/01/miller/index.html). The TV people were embarrassed for him, he was making such an ass of himself. He almost made the Bush twins look good -- and their appearance at the convention was considered its low point, up to now. As Sullivan notes, the contrast between the hopeful and intelligent Barack Obama and the half-crazed-with-hate-and-fear Miller could not have been any plainer. The Republican leadership has given up trying to be "moderate" and is now in a desperate effort to use naked, brain-killing fear and senseless rage to sway voters. It's pure craziness. In closing, I'm providing this hommage to the overheated brain of ZigZag Zell, courtesy of an e-mail from an anonymous correspondent: >>> He can't seem to face up to the facts. >>> He hates how Democrats are nice to blacks. >>> Can't speak 'cause his head's on fire -- >>> DON'T touch him, he's a real bad liar! >>> Psycho Miller, que'est-ce que c'est? >>> Fa fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa FA fa better >>> Run run run, run run run awaaaay...
http://americanpolitics.com/20040903Baker.html

They Can't Seem to Face up to the Facts Bushistas claim that Psycho Miller's speech wasn't approved by the GOP... ... but that's not what Uncle Karl said Wednesday night! by Tamara Baker September 3, 2004 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- In the wake of universal horror and revulsion, the Bushistas are now claiming that nobody in the Republican party authorized Zell "Psycho" Miller's crazed speech Wednesday night (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5897622/). There's only one problem with this effort to distance themselves from their own keynote speaker: It's a lie. Here's what Karl Rove said on PBS' NewsHouse Wednesday night -- the same night that Psycho Miller did his Cujo routine -- about the Republican National Convention (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec04/rove_9-01.html): >>> JIM LEHRER: There's been much made, of course, not only this >>> convention but also with the Democrats in Boston about how ever >>> word uttered by everybody is pretty closely edited and monitored. >>> Do you do that? Does your office do that here? >>> KARL ROVE: No, there's official proceedings which reviews those. >>> That's not new, incidentally. I think that's been around since >>> the '60s. Hmmmmm? Is that a Tina Weymouth bass riff I hear? Why, yes, yes it is. ...They can't seem to face up to the facts...

You must've slept through history class because Andrew Jackson while not being anywhere nearly as politically correct as we expect by today's standard's was still no lunatic closet pro the rich at the expense of the poor republican Zell Miller. Andrew Jackson had his first Presidential election victory in 1824 stolen under circumstances that are very similar to what happened to Al Gore in 2000. In contrast to today. the theft of Andrew Jackson's first victory resulted in the founding of the DNC by regional leaders of the democratic party who were totally outraged that the will of the people had been so boldly and blatantly thwarted by John Quincy Adams another idiot son of a 1 term President. In 1828, the democratic party leadership then rallied behind Andrew Jackson and together they beat the crap out of John Quincy Adams for stealing the 1824 election. I don't understand how someone who is so obviously anti Gore is allowed to post at this forum?