Democratic advice

Sen. Zell Miller, a Democrat from Georgia, became nationally famous last month for not becoming a Republican (though he sometimes votes like one) when Sen. Jim Jeffords left the GOP and handed the Senate to Democrats. Worse for the GOP, Sen. Miller has provided his party with a rare commodity in politics – good advice for the next election.

Writing not long ago in the New York Times, Sen. Miller describes just how badly Al Gore lost in the South, offers two anecdotes from his own experience, relates them to the recent tax-cut vote in Congress and suggests how Democratic history can serve the party in the future. The first anecdote is about everyone’s favorite topic, gun control. While running for governor in 1994, party members informed Sen. Miller that polls showed a majority of Georgians favored gun control and that he should, too.

Instead, the candidate took another poll that asked voters whether they agreed or disagreed with the following: “Whenever I hear politicians talking about gun control, it makes me wonder if they understand my values or my way of life.” More than 70 percent agreed with the statement, which Mr. Miller concluded reflects not just the gun issue but values. “If Southern voters ever start to think you don’t understand them – or even worse, much worse, if they think you look down on them – they will never vote for you.”

A second anecdote: As governor, Mr. Miller tried to restore the state flag of his childhood by replacing the one segregationists had put up in the 1950s. He lost that fight badly, he says, not because the Georgia State Assembly was full of racists but because state lawmakers resented the tinge of political correctness associated with removing the segregationist flag. “[F]or Southern voters, the issues you choose to talk about – or not talk about – are as important as the positions you take on those issues,” he writes.

You can, and as a political leader must, confront some difficult issues, but before trying to accomplish your agenda, Sen. Miller concludes, earn the trust of the voters. Mr. Gore, he said, did not understand this the way Bill Clinton did. And one good way for members of Congress to earn trust is to show voters that they are serious about how they spend or return people’s money. It is fair to argue, as many Democrats did, that the size and tilt of the GOP tax cut caused them to favor a smaller alternative, but Sen. Miller’s emphasis – what he chooses to talk about – still resonates.

The Kennedy-Johnson tax bill of 1964, he points out, cut all tax brackets, was supported by Democrats in Congress, who were subsequently able to pass an ambitious agenda that included Medicare. In his home state, then-Gov. Miller used the strategy to boost Georgia’s education system, pre-K through grad school, in a state that had not been known for being eager to spend on education.

Trust first, agenda second. The more daring politicians might even venture that such a strategy need not be confined to the south.