WASHINGTON — Zell Miller is telling a tale, a parable about a mountaineer, his new bride and their stubborn mule.
The silver-haired senator from Georgia is seated in his office on Capitol Hill, amid small shrines to Mickey Mantle and the U.S. Marine Corps, wearing a charcoal gray suit and shiny black cowboy boots. He has made it his mission lately to torment the Democratic Party, his lifelong political home, and verbally torture John F. Kerry, the party's presumptive presidential nominee.
The tale involves a balky mule being hit with a 2-by-4 and ends with the mountaineer threatening his young wife with the same. As Miller grins, having made his point about asserting one's self, he steals a glance at his chief of staff, a young woman sitting a deferential distance away.
It seems a small concession to the notion that, just maybe, in this age, among a certain set, joking about spousal abuse may not be the most politic thing, funny as the story is. But then the 72-year-old Miller is retiring at the end of his term early next year, and if there are any bridges left standing, it is not for lack of incendiary effort.
He broke with his fellow Democrats from the start of the Bush administration, delivering key votes to install John Ashcroft as attorney general and cosponsoring the president's first tax cut. He has written a thin, angry book, "A National Party No More," that depicts the Democratic Party as a mushy-headed, liberal-kowtowing parody of its old self. He has enthusiastically endorsed Bush's reelection, and taken to appearances like one earlier last month, before Georgia Republicans, where he savaged Kerry as a man "so out of touch with the average American it would be comical if it were not so dangerous."
His remarks drew an uproarious ovation, not unlike the one that greeted Miller's paint-blistering keynote speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention where, in the service of Bill Clinton, Miller assailed Bush's father as a "timid man" and a cosseted millionaire who "just doesn't get it" when people complained about hard times.
The turnabout has left many longtime friends and political allies sad and angry and, above all, perplexed.
"In the 1970s, '80s and '90s, nobody labored in the vineyards of the Democratic Party as consistently and loyally, from the national level to the state level, as Zell Miller," said Keith Mason, who served 10 years ago as staff chief to then-Gov. Miller and still regards him with great affection and appreciation. "That's why so many Democrats were surprised when he suddenly and consistently supported the president."
