[Overpaid Slacker]

Some grist for the mill from OpinionJournal:

... But the speech was badly received among the media elite. Especially scathing was blogger Andrew Sullivan:

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.

Sullivan's blasting Miller as a "Dixiecrat" is simply bizarre. The term Dixiecrat refers specifically to supporters of Strom Thurmond's third-party presidential bid in 1948 (when, as Glenn Reynolds notes, Miller was not even old enough to vote), and more generally to the segregationist Democrats who succeeded in blocking most civil rights legislation until 1964. How in the world could Miller's speech last night have been "a classic Dixiecrat speech" when it not only did not defend segregation (a question that was settled long ago), but did not even remotely allude to race? {No Schit; talk about bald lies and subject changement when you can't refute what was said ... jeez. JP} The speech was entirely about national security.

This was not Miller's first political convention speech. In 1992, also at Madison Square Garden, then-Gov. Miller delivered the keynote speech at the Democratic convention that nominated Bill Clinton. Does anyone remember The New Republic, of which Andrew Sullivan was then editor, criticizing the Dems for having a "Dixiecrat" as their keynoter?

Josh Marshall cites Sullivan favorably and then pooh-poohs the speech:

Just on a pure political level it didn't seem to me like the sort of speech the planners would want in prime time. There's a lot of rage and anger in that man--and I can't imagine a viewer coming to that speech with an open and politically-uncommitted mind who wouldn't wonder where it was from. The tone struck me as a bit ranting and wild, barking and angry, with Miller channeling some mix of Heart of Darkness and Deliverance, which I can't quite decipher but did not want to be near.

Sullivan's and Marshall's comments reveal less about Miller than about the provincialism of our big-city media elites. All the evidence we've seen suggests that Miller's speech went over very well, and not just with Southerners. Writes National Review Online's Jim Geraghty:

The [MSNBC] focus group gathered by pollster Frank Luntz appeared to like Zell's speech better than Cheney's. They're describing it as, "stronger . . . focused on the family . . . dead on, convincing coming from a Democrat."

Then there's one woman: "His entire focus was on terrorism and why we should be afraid."

The "spitballs" line got a big laugh. The focus group seemed to like the line, and many thought it illustrated a serious point well.

The Cincinnati Enquirer notes that the focus group's participants were from Cincinnati, which, while in southern Ohio, is hardly the Deep South. Another bit of anecdotal support: When we got home and checked our e-mail, we'd received two messages from women of our acquaintance, both around 30 years old. Both live in big coastal cities and grew up in more conservative areas, but not in the South--one in rural Oregon, the other in California's Central Valley. Both gave Miller's speech rave reviews.

Then there was this hilarious postspeech exchange between Miller and Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball":

Matthews: Do you believe, Senator, truthfully, that John Kerry wants to defend the country with spitballs? Do you believe that?

Miller: That was a metaphor, wasn't it? Do you know what a metaphor is?

Matthews: Well, what do you mean by a metaphor?

Those city folks sure are sophisticated, aren't they?