Instant Backlash

As I noted below, Matt Welch, politically independent contributor to the libertarian magazine Reason, found Zell Miller's speech to be "the most frightening" of his lifetime.

That comment was charitable compared to Andrew Sullivan's four separate posts on Miller. Here's the first:

Zell Miller's address will, I think, go down as a critical moment in this campaign, and maybe in the history of the Republican party. I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats' keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift. Then you see Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed among the Democrats. Remember who this man is: once a proud supporter of racial segregation, a man who lambasted LBJ for selling his soul to the negroes. His speech tonight was in this vein, a classic Dixiecrat speech, jammed with bald lies, straw men, and hateful rhetoric. As an immigrant to this country and as someone who has been to many Southern states and enjoyed astonishing hospitality and warmth and sophistication, I long dismissed some of the Northern stereotypes about the South. But Miller did his best to revive them. The man's speech was not merely crude; it added whole universes to the word crude.

Indeed. My Arkansan roommate assures me that nothing Miller said was very far out of mainstream Southern thought. Why, oh why, therefore, must the punditry continue to pretend that the only region of the country to enter into armed rebellion against the duly elected government of the United States, is yet and shall ever be the "heartland." But I digress.

Dick Cheney's first words at the podium, even preceding the ritual nods to family members (anybody notice the absence of a certain daughter named Mary?), were an endorsement of Miller's hateful slurs. Just imagine the reaction if John Edwards had taken a moment during his acceptance speech to endorse or invoke Michael Moore-ite slander. Through its selection of a keynote speaker, and its vice presidential nominee's approbation of that speaker, the Republican party has made it eminently clear where it stands. The heart of the party is not in Arnold's California or in Rudy's New York, but in the unreconstructed South of the 1950s.