DWARF TOSSER:

Is the Democratic Party clueless about the modern South? (Bill Cotterell, Oct. 21, 2003, Jewish World Review)

"But Lord, those current presidential candidates in my party!" [Senator Zell] Miller writes. "They are good, smart and able folks but if I decide to follow any of them down their road, I'd have to keep my left turn signal blinking." Among his Senate colleagues, Miller sees John Edwards "shooting brightly through the skies like Halley's Comet," Joe Lieberman "steadily and surely plodding along … like Aesop's tortoise" and John Kerry "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 Bob Graham, who made Florida a great governor, and Howard Dean of Vermont, with whom I served as lieutenant governor and governor," says Miller. "Clever and glib, but deep this Vermont pond is not."

The kind folks at Stroud & Hall just sent us Senator Miller's very amusing book, A National Party No More, amusing to a Republican anyway; for Democrats who'd like to win elections it must be heartbreaking. Mr. Miller combines a folksy memoir of his inordinately successful political life with an impassioned polemic against the special interests and ideologues who have driven his beloved party so far out of the mainstream that it has virtually ceased to be a viable party in the South.

There are many great lines, but that assessment of Howard Dean is really devastating.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 21, 2003 10:19 AM