Lured from retirement
Miller was happily retired, living in Young Harris with his wife, Shirley, and their two yellow Labs, teaching at the local college, when Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes came calling back in 2000. The state's Republican senator, Paul Coverdell, had died suddenly and Barnes wanted his fellow Democrat to fill the vacancy.
Miller was loath to accept the appointment, having long given up his desire to go to Washington. (He even turned down a dream job to be Navy secretary under Clinton.) Miller told Barnes no, but relented when pressed. It was the old Marine in him, he told reporters. "I have an obligation to give but one response when my governor asks me to serve," Miller said, "the response that was drilled into me at boot camp in Parris Island: 'Yes, sir!' "
Today, he makes little secret of his disgust for Washington and most of the left-leaning Democrats who dominate the party on Capitol Hill. "There have been times, especially my first couple of years up here, where I wish I would just wake up and it all would have been a dream," Miller says in a voice redolent with contempt. "But I have come around to now believing that I'm glad I came. It's been a very instructional process.... I would not have wanted to go to my grave without seeing just how messed up this system is in Washington."
Like many who arrived before him, Miller acknowledges the difficulty of going from being a hands-on, snap-to-it executive to one of 100 senators slogging through a legislative body meant to run at a glacial pace. He recounted a conversation with fellow Democrat Joseph Biden of Delaware, who approached a glum-looking Miller not long into his term. "You have to go through three stages, I guess kind of like death," Miller says. "He said the first stage is you can't believe this place.... The second stage is anger. You want to change it. And then the third stage, finally, you get around to accept it. Well, I haven't been around long enough to accept it. I'm still in that anger stage Sen. Biden talked about."
Why Miller chooses to vent that anger against his party is a puzzlement to a great many observers. Some plumb for psychological reasons, saying he craves the attention, or wants to get back at those Democrats who talked him out of his contented retirement. Some say Miller has given voice to a sentiment a lot of Democrats feel -- that the party needs to focus more on the kitchen-table concerns of average Americans -- but taken the argument to a reckless extreme. "He's gone from the guy who'd like to see his party changed and turned into the guy who'd like to see his party abolished," said James Carville, the Democratic strategist who helped make Miller governor then, at his behest, helped get Clinton elected president.
