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Georgia: Senior Senator Sen. Zell Miller (D) Last Updated July 9, 2003
Zell Miller, a Democrat, was appointed to the Senate to replace Paul Coverdell after his death in July 2000 and was elected to fill out the remainder of his term in November. Miller grew up in the mountains of north Georgia in the town of Young Harris, in a house his widowed mother built of stones and in a town of which she was elected Mayor. This is the sort of country that produced Andrew Jackson and Miller, more than any other active politician, brings a Jacksonian spirit to his work. He joined the Marines Corps after dropping out of Emory University; his 1997 book is entitled Corps Values: Everything You Need to Know, I Learned in the Marines. He returned home, graduated from the University of Georgia, and taught political science at Young Harris College, and was elected Mayor as well. He was elected to the Georgia Senate in 1960, at 28, and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House in 1964 and 1966; he worked for Lester Maddox in his last two years as governor, and ran the state Democratic Party when Jimmy Carter was governor. He ran against Senator Herman Talmadge in 1980, and lost 59%-41% in the runoff. Miller was elected lieutenant governor in 1974 and held the office, whose occupant tends to run the state Senate, for 16 years. In 1990, he finally ran for governor. In the Democratic primary he led with 41% of the vote to 29% for Andrew Young, longtime Atlanta mayor, congressman and ambassador to the United Nations, and 21% for Roy Barnes, then a state senator and later Miller's successor as governor. In the runoff he beat Young 62%-38%. In the general he beat Johnny Isakson, now 6th District congressman, 53%-45%. Miller's main issue in his 1990 campaign was a lottery, with revenues to go to education. The lottery passed, and the money went to fund pre-kindergarten for four-year-olds and to fund HOPE scholarships--free tuition at any Georgia college, public or private, for freshmen who maintain B averages in high school. Miller had occasional defeats: In 1993 he tried to get the Confederate stars and bars removed from the Georgia flag (it was placed there in 1956, when politicians were opposing school desegregation) but the legislature resisted. Miller was an early supporter of Bill Clinton for president and in 1992 got the Georgia primary rescheduled a week earlier, on March 3. Clinton's victory there was a key step in his nomination, and Miller's support helped him carry Georgia in November by 13,000 votes. But his association with Clinton hurt in 1994 when Miller was opposed by Guy Millner, founder of the Norrell temporary employee firm. Miller won by only 51%-49% in this heavily Republican year, and took tougher stands on welfare and taxes in his second term. His job approval rating rose to as high as 85%. Term-limited, he decided to retire and teach at Young Harris College and Emory University, declaring, "I will never be a candidate ever again, and we might as well go further and say that I will not take a job or an appointment in Washington." Coverdell had been re-elected in 1998 by 52%-45% and became an important part of the Republican leadership. Then, entirely unexpectedly, in three days in July 2000 Coverdell was hospitalized, underwent surgery and died of a stroke. The appointment to fill his seat was in the hands of Governor Roy Barnes. He asked Miller, who refused. Barnes flew up to Young Harris and tried again, and Miller finally agreed: he had, after all, tried to keep his promise by turning down this Senate seat twice. The appointment lasted only until November, when under Georgia law voters would choose among candidates listed without party affiliation for the remaining four years of Coverdell's term; if no candidate received 50%, there would be a runoff. Miller, with his high job ratings, was the immediate favorite, and Georgia's eight Republican congressmen, most interested in the race, quickly dropped out. Two Republicans remained. One was Lewis Jordan, founder of ValuJet, who promised to put $3 million of his own into the race. The other was Mack Mattingly, who won the seat against troubled veteran Herman Talmadge in 1980 by 51%-49% and then lost it to Democrat Wyche Fowler in 1986 by 51%-49%. (In 1992 Coverdell beat Fowler by, you guessed it, 51%-49%.) Concerned that having two Republicans in the race would cost the party any chance of winning, Jordan bowed out in early August 2000. Miller was far ahead in the polls; his appointment, National Journal's Charlie Cook wrote at the time, "effectively puts control of the Senate into play for the first time in this election cycle." Miller started off his career by joining Republicans and voting for repeal of estate tax and marriage penalty, a measure Clinton vowed to veto. Mattingly based much of his campaign on the Republican label. In debates and ads, Miller reached back to Mattingly's Senate record and accused him of voting to increase the retirement age and limit Social Security inflation increases and of "voting no" on education 14 times. He admitted that he supported Al Gore for president, but only, he said, because Gore helped with the Atlanta Olympics and with recovery from natural disasters. Mattingly ran a spot showing Coverdell's widow saying, "If Paul were here, he'd wish Zell well, but he'd work day and night to elect Mack to follow in his true conservative footsteps." A Miller ad--there were more of them, for he had more funding--signed off, "Zell Miller--the man who brought HOPE to Georgia." Even as George W. Bush carried the state 55%-43%, Miller whipped Mattingly 58%-38%. Bush carried 125 of Georgia's 159 counties; Mattingly carried only 10. Miller carried out a promise to be bipartisan early in the 107th Congress. Soon after former Senator John Ashcroft was nominated to be attorney general, Miller said he would support him--the first Democrat to do so. In George W. Bush's first week in office, Miller joined Texas Republican Phil Gramm, a Georgia native, in co-sponsoring Bush's tax cut. Miller supported oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and voted to kill the Clinton administration's ergonomics regulations. In 2002 he was a lead sponsor, with Edward Kennedy and Bob Graham, of the Democrats' prescription drug bill, which got 52 votes but failed because it was short of the 60 required to exceed the budget resolution. In April 2002 he was the keynote speaker at the National Rifle Association convention. But in September 2002 he wrote in The Washington Post a list of 10 questions George W. Bush should answer about war in Iraq. As the most popular politician in Georgia, he weighed in on state politics. In October 2001 he criticized Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's letter to Saudi Prince Alwaleed, which apologized for Mayor Rudy Giuliani's rejection of his contribution, as "disgraceful"; in the August 2002 primary he endorsed her successful opponent Denise Majette. He gave the strongest possible backing to his colleague Max Cleland, in his tough race against Congressman Saxby Chambliss, appearing in TV spots for him. But at the same time he criticized the Democrats' opposition to Bush on the homeland security bill and joined with Gramm in sponsoring an amendment, rejected by other Democrats including Cleland, that would have given the president the right to waive work rules provided he notified Congress in advance. "We are not doing our party any good by feeding the perception that Democrats are undermining the President of the United States on the war on terrorism. The purpose of homeland security should be to protect lives, not jobs." He also cut TV spots for Governor Roy Barnes, Lieutenant Governor Mark Taylor and Attorney General Thurbert Baker and radio spots for Speaker Thomas Murphy (a frequent adversary when they ran the two houses of the legislature from 1974 to 1990) and Democratic candidates for labor commissioner and school superintendent. Watching an attack ad against Tennessee Democrat Bob Clement, an old friend, he got mad--"I stood up so fast, I scared my dogs"--and made his only campaign appearance outside Georgia for him. Chambliss consultant Tom Perdue tartly noted, "They use him like a cleaning fluid to remove the stain of Bill Clinton and Al Gore from a candidate." After the election that was so disastrous for his party in his state, he said, "It is a heck of a note when you have the chairman, the leader and the titular leader of the national party who can't go into the South because they would do more harm than good. We have got to become a national party not just in name, but in fact." Of the Senate Democrats' stand on homeland security, he said, "It will go down as one of the major political blunders of our time. I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing. It was the chief reason for the defeat of some of our best people." Miller's votes and outspoken statements naturally prompted questions about whether he would switch parties. After Jim Jeffords announced his switch in May 2001, he said, "I am not going to switch to the Republican party, but neither am I going to march in lockstep with these Democrats up here blindly off a cliff, and that's where they sometimes try to lead me." Then, in January 2003, Miller announced he would not seek reelection. He also said he would not campaign for any candidate for the seat. Within a week, Republican Congressman Johnny Isakson announced his candidacy; in May, Republican Congressman Mac Collins also said he would run. Possible Democratic candidates included Lieutenant Governor Mark Taylor, Attorney General Thurbert Baker, former Secretary of State Lewis Massey and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. Republicans will have a good chance of winning this seat, as they did in 1980, 1992 and 1998.
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