Worse perhaps, many Democrats simply dismiss Miller as irrelevant. "If he wanted to get the attention of the party, there are a thousand ways to do that other than endorsing the Republican candidate for president and becoming their attack dog," said Ed Kilgore, who served as an aide to then-Gov. Miller and now directs policy for the centrist DLC.
"This isn't having a dialogue with people. This is walking out of the room."
Miller, who hates being "stretched out on the couch," says his reasons are both practical and political. It is not he who has changed, the senator insists, but the national Democratic Party. It is no longer the muscular party of Harry Truman, or the tax-cutting party of John F. Kennedy. "What we've got now is a bunch of neo-isolationists like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and Howard Dean and the other protesters of the '60s that are now raising so much hell," Miller says. "Their music and their hairstyle and their clothes may have changed, but it's the same bunch."
The obvious question -- why doesn't Miller just switch parties and become a Republican? -- is easy to answer: The Democratic Party was bred into his bones.
Growing up in the mountains of northern Georgia, one of the few places in the South with a genuine two-party system back then, partisanship was more than just something a person thought about on election day. Democrats shopped at the Democrat-owned filling station, bought their groceries from a Democratic grocer and were expected to date and marry only members of their own party. Same for the Republicans, going all the way back to the Civil War.
"When I meet my maker," the senator says, "I fully expect my mama and daddy to be somewhere close around. And I want to be able to look at them and say, 'Hey, I stayed a Democrat.' "
It pains him, though, to see old friendships sundered. Carville, for one, asked for his campaign contributions back after Miller came out in favor of Bush's tax cuts. "That's part of it, that's part of the process," Miller says, picking his words slowly as he peers down between his knees at the carpet. "That's part of the business."
Miller is a prideful man, and more than a tad defensive about his humble upbringing. The word "hillbilly" is about the worst thing one can say in his presence; for years he harangued the Atlanta newspaper about running the backwoods "Snuffy Smith" cartoon, until the paper finally ceased. A lover of baseball, NASCAR and country music, Miller is also steeped in literature and classical music, and he laughs when asked about a favorite quotation from Shakespeare. The passage, from "Macbeth," ponders life's ephemeral nature.
A short time later, an e-mail arrives from the senator's chief of staff. "Miller asked me to let you know that while the quote you mentioned is one of his favorites, his all-time favorite is this one from "Hamlet":
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
