Recalling political ‘Michelangelo’
Hundreds mourn former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller
YOUNG HARRIS, Ga. — A governor and senator, friend and counselor to presidents, Zell Miller walked the marbled halls of American power. He was remembered more simply Monday as a “Methodist and Marine” whose accomplished public life was the outgrowth of personal virtues traced to his Appalachian roots.
“In the art of politics, he was Michelangelo,” his former aide and prominent Democratic strategist Paul Begala told several hundred mourners at Young Harris College in Miller’s hometown, where Miller was born during the Great Depression and died Friday in his old family home at 86.
“He knew not only how to win power in elections, but how to wield power in office,” said Begala, who worked on the 1990 campaign for governor that Miller won.
The funeral Monday launched three days of public honors for Miller, who served as governor of Georgia from 1991 to 1999 and U.S. senator from 2000 to 2005. There will be a second funeral Tuesday in Atlanta, after which Miller will lie in state at the Georgia Capitol until a state funeral Wednesday.
Miller is remembered as architect of an education lottery that has financed pre-kindergarten programs for 1.6 million children while providing HOPE college scholarships for 1.8 million more. Like most white Southern politicians of his generation, he once opposed civil rights legislation, but later fought, unsuccessfully, to remove Confederate insignia from the state flag.
He is sometimes recalled nationally as the stridently independent Democrat who late in his career accused his party of veering left and coddling terrorists; he opposed samesex marriage and backed Republican President George W. Bush for re-election in 2004.
Begala gave a nod to some paradoxes, a “career politician” who campaigned “like an outsider,” a “deeply devoted Christian” who cursed with aplomb. But he and other eulogists argued for bigger takeaways.
“Why did this man apply this remarkable genius to education, to economic development, to helping lift up the people that others look down on?” Begala asked. “Because he’d been there. He never forgot who he was, where he came from or who sent him.”