An Historical Look At Zell Miller

As U.S. Sen. Zell Miller explains it, it's an Appalachian thing. He's been a Democrat all his life. He will deliver the keynote address to the Republican National Convention on Wednesday as a Democrat. And he will still be a Democrat as he travels the country this fall campaigning for President Bush.

So as Democrats from Washington to Atlanta step up their demands that Miller get out of the party, Georgia's retiring senior senator just shakes his head and says it one more time: He was"born a Democrat" and will die one.

"No one can understand it except those folks who live in Appalachia," Miller wrote in his latest book,"A National Party No More," a smash-mouth appraisal of a Democratic Party that Miller says abandoned him and the American mainstream by tilting too far left.

Indeed, many of those living in the swatch of Appalachia that cuts across northern Georgia, where Miller was raised and still lives, said in interviews last week that they have no problem with Miller siding with Republicans.

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Certainly, much of the support Miller enjoys in North Georgia is the product of local pride and loyalty to a man who has represented this area in state and federal government for 40 years and who has accomplished much.

For decades, it was part of the nation's poorest region. But thanks not only to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, but to the better roads and lush golf courses that arrived during Miller's 24-year stretch as Georgia's lieutenant governor and governor, North Georgia has rebounded more quickly than other parts of the region.

It is also close enough to Atlanta to have felt the impact of the city's boom. Vacation homes now dot virtually every hollow; marinas line the TVA lakes. A sign along one coiled stretch of U.S. 19 near Blairsville captures the metamorphosis:"Gated Log Cabin Community," it reads.

But much more is going on, local politicians, historians and political analysts said. The exodus by white conservatives from the Democratic Party has been under way for years in other parts of the South. That trend belatedly reached Georgia, which two years ago ended its run as the last holdout in the region and elected its first Republican governor in 130 years. Yet many old-timers cling to the Democratic label while voting for Republican candidates.

"We're a little bit different than the Washington Democrats," said state Rep. Charles F. Jenkins (D-Blairsville), who represents Miller's home county of Towns as well as Rabun, Union and White counties.

Jenkins said he understands why Miller refuses to join the Republican Party.

"You've got people up here who just will not switch from the Democratic Party because they've been Democrats since they were born," Jenkins said."They're hard-headed mountain people. And hard-headed mountain people don't switch for anybody."