ZELL IS OTHER PEOPLE

We finally made it over to Madison Square Garden Wednesday night and were in the hall for Senator Zell Miller’s keynote speech, which we realized, after getting home and reading some of the commentary on it, had been an important cultural moment. Georgia’s Senator Miller delivered a hard-hitting speech lambasting fellow Democrat John Kerry for weakness on defense. Some highlights:

In the summer of 1940, I was an 8-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley. Our country was not yet at war, but even we children knew that there were some crazy men across the ocean who would kill us if they could.

President Roosevelt, in his speech that summer, told America “all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.” In 1940, Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee. And there is no better example of someone repealing their “private plans” than this good man. He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time.

And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue. Shortly before Wilkie died, he told a friend that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between “here lies a president” or “here lies one who contributed to saving freedom,” he would prefer the latter. Where are such statesmen today? Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most?

After running through a list of weapons systems Mr. Kerry, who by the way served in Vietnam, voted against during his long Senate career, Mr. Miller said:

This is the man who wants to be the Commander in Chief of our U.S. Armed Forces? U.S. forces armed with what? Spitballs?

And then there was this:

Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations. Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide. John Kerry, who says he doesn’t like outsourcing, wants to outsource our national security. That’s the most dangerous outsourcing of all.

The crowd thrilled to Mr. Miller’s performance, which was as rousing as President Clinton’s at the Democratic Convention in July. And the things Mr. Miller said had the added advantage of being true. But the speech was badly received among the press elite. Especially scathing was blogger Andrew Sullivan:

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.

Mr. Sullivan’s blasting Miller as a “Dixiecrat” is simply bizarre. The term Dixiecrat refers specifically to supporters of Strom Thurmond’s third-party presidential bid in 1948 (when, as Glenn Reynolds notes, Mr. Miller was not even old enough to vote), and more generally to the segregationist Democrats who succeeded in blocking most civil rights legislation until 1964. How in the world could Mr. Miller’s speech last night have been “a classic Dixiecrat speech” when it not only did not defend segregation (a question that was settled long ago), but did not even remotely allude to race? The speech was entirely about national security.

This was not Mr. Miller’s first political convention speech. In 1992, also at Madison Square Garden, then-Governor Miller delivered the keynote speech at the Democratic convention that nominated Mr. Clinton. Does anyone remember The New Republic, of which Mr. Sullivan was then editor, criticizing the Dems for having a “Dixiecrat” as their keynoter?

Josh Marshall cites Mr. Sullivan favorably and then pooh-poohs the speech:

Just on a pure political level it didn’t seem to me like the sort of speech the planners would want in prime time. There’s a lot of rage and anger in that man – and I can’t imagine a viewer coming to that speech with an open and politically-uncommitted mind who wouldn’t wonder where it was from. The tone struck me as a bit ranting and wild, barking and angry, with Miller channeling some mix of Heart of Darkness and Deliverance, which I can’t quite decipher but did not want to be near.

Mr. Sullivan’s and Mr. Marshall’s comments reveal less about Mr. Miller than about the provincialism of our big city press elites. All the evidence we’ve seen suggests that Mr. Miller’s speech went over very well, and not just with Southerners. Writes National Review Online’s Jim Geraghty:

The [MSNBC] focus group gathered by pollster Frank Luntz appeared to like Zell’s speech better than Cheney’s. They’re describing it as, “stronger…focused on the family…dead on, convincing coming from a Democrat.” Then there’s one woman: “His entire focus was on terrorism and why we should be afraid.” The “spitballs” line got a big laugh. The focus group seemed to like the line, and many thought it illustrated a serious point well.

The Cincinnati Enquirer notes that the focus group’s participants were from Cincinnati, which, while in southern Ohio, is hardly the Deep South. Another bit of anecdotal support: When we got home and checked our e-mail, we’d received two messages from women of our acquaintance, both around 30 years old. Both live in big coastal cities and grew up in more conservative areas, but not in the South – one in rural Oregon, the other in California’s Central Valley. Both gave Mr. Miller’s speech rave reviews. Then there was this hilarious postspeech exchange between Mr. Miller and Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s “Hardball”: Matthews: Do you believe, Senator, truthfully, that John Kerry wants to defend the country with spitballs? Do you believe that? Miller: That was a metaphor, wasn’t it? Do you know what a metaphor is? Matthews: Well, what do you mean by a metaphor?

Those city folks sure are sophisticated, aren’t they?

This column is adapted from the Best of the Web, which is issued daily at OpinionJournal.com. (C)2004 Dow Jones and Company Inc.