John L. Perry
Monday, June 28, 2004

There’s nothing bi-polar, topsy-turvy or uncharacteristic about what either of those Democrats is doing. Both are being what they actually are. This is a real reality show.

The former Democratic vice president from Tennessee and the retiring Democratic senator from Georgia accurately epitomize what’s become of the Democratic Party in the past decade.

Return of Reality

What’s going on here is nothing less than a fundamental reconstitution of America’s two historic political parties, the kind that comes along only every century or two.

The Democratic Party has become captive of the extreme left in America and thus the logical cote for the political cuckoos in quest of a congenial perch.

To those who know Little Albert, as Gore is regarded without tribute in his sort-of home state, it’s no surprise today to see him acting bug-swattin’ nuts on television. After his layer after layer of reinventions, the Al Gore you now see really is the real Al Gore, at peace with himself at last, one might think.

Swamp Fever

Gore has always been most at home deep into the marshes of neo-Marxist, Trotsky-genre radicalism. When his carotid artery starts pumping and his visage turns from pasty blank to raspberry-purple, that’s our Al all right.

It’s amusing to listen to televised pseudo-journalists ponder what that’s all about. What it’s all about isn’t Gore, it’s about the Democratic Party.

The party of Jefferson, Wilson, FDR, Truman, heck, even Carter and Clinton has in the past 10 to 12 years lurched drunkenly to the left. It’s now so hard aport that its new captain might as well be Admiral Gore, with Screechin’ Howard Dean his ideological first mate.

Not Aberrations

During the primaries, Gore and Dean were attracted to one another like a couple of magnetic black-and-white Scotty dogs on a saloon bar top. They are not, as some of the news media tend to dismiss them, two canons dangerously loose on a deck awash. They, not John Kerry, are the authentic pilots of the political party gone terminally adrift.

That ungainly, morose Massachusetts senator who will be the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee is little more than an expensively attired, stiff-collar, hereditary-commissioned, ornamental show-off striding the deck as if he actually knew where he was or where the ship is going. Kerry may surmise he’s captain, but watch the mutiny should he dare order a tack to starboard.

He no more represents what the Democratic Party, circa 2004, stands for than would Robert A. Taft, Thomas E. Dewey or Nelson Rockefeller epitomize today’s Republican Party.

Zell’s Party Left Him

Gore is but half the Democratic Party story. The other half is spelled out by Zell Miller – in plain language everyone in the land can understand and relate to personally.

Just as the Democratic Party has caromed off to the left so far it is the perfect platform for the likes of Gore, so has it left Miller no comfortable planking to plant his feet other than amidships of the Republican Party.

While the Democratic Party was undergoing a decade of meticulous self-destruction, the Republican Party was being invigorated, often despite itself, by a decade of reorientation. In no one is this transformation better illustrated than Zell Miller.

Not Zell Who Changed

The Zell Miller who will address the Republican convention, meeting Aug. 29-Sept. 4 in New York, is the same Zell Miller who gave the keynote address in the same city at the 1992 Democratic convention that nominated Bill Clinton the first time. Remember? That was when Clinton, appealing to non-extremists, advertised himself as a “new Democrat.” He neglected to mention he also lies a lot, and went on to hand over his party to the crazies.

Has Miller undergone a sea-change of political redirection since 1992? Anyone who knows the former Georgia governor would not even entertain that question.

The product of a little North Georgia mountain community called Young Harris, where they don’t raise many wishy-washers, Miller is nothing if not doggedly consistent. No, it’s not Zell who has changed his compass heading. It’s the Democratic Party that’s gone missing.

Picking Up Survivors

Just as Gore represents the blame-America leftists who have pirated the Democratic Party, Miller represents those Democrats who have been set adrift by Gore’s party – and are now clambering aboard a new kind of welcoming Republican Party.

This realignment – actually, reinvention – of the two major parties is so monumental it has escaped the notice of lock-step, tunnel-vision jabberers who have, in cahoots with radicals, infested much of the major news media.

This is definitely not how they planned for things to go. But stuff happens. The American people, without permission, are taking control of themselves.

Speaking Their Language

The 2004 presidential election will be won by this emerging Republican Party because its new incarnation reaches out farther into the wide American middleground for more “uncommitted” voters than the barnacled Democratic Party could ever hope to pick up among the flotsam of leftists on the outer edge of the middle.

When Gore disgorges, he stokes the adrenalin of homesick far-leftists who are not numerous enough to elect dogcatchers and have nowhere else to go unless it is to help Ralph Nader and his leftover wobblies give George W. Bush an even-wider margin of victory in November.

When Miller mounts the Republican convention podium and warns America about an “out-of-touch, ultraliberal from Taxachusetts” that his Democratic Party has come up with this year, he will be speaking to the hearts and minds of millions of other voters of independent mind who, along with him, have been betrayed.

That’s what Al Gore and Zell Miller signify about today’s Democratic Party – and tomorrow’s Republican Party.

So, blather on, Al. Give ‘em hell, Zell.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

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