Greg Wythe has a long and in depth review of Zell Miller’s book “A National Party No More” that’s well worth your time to read. Greg is someone who’s closer to Miller’s end of the party spectrum than I am, and he finds some merit and a lot of fault with what Miller has to say. Check it out.
While you’re there, you should also read about Elaine Kamark and her thesis on why Massachussettes keeps electing Republican governors. It’s essentially the same problem in different clothes: not making a good enough effort to understand a large segment of the voting population. Quite a bit to think about between now and next November.
The US Senate, on a unidimensional scale, is almost perfectly in order… all the Democrats to the left of all the Republicans. The sole exception to this was Zell Miller, to the right of the Northeast Republicans (Collins,Snowe,Chafee,Specter and Jeffords). Since his announcement that he does not plan to run again, Miller has leaped further rightwards, obviously, to the place he always felt he should be, in the center of the ideology of the Republican Party.
He was disgustingly loyal to the Democrats, and should have switched to the GOP in 1964 with the rest of the Dixiecrats.