Tag: Young Harris College

YOUNG HARRIS, Ga. (AP) — 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 he was born during the Great Depression and died Friday. Monday’s funeral service launched three days of public honors for Miller, who served as Georgia’s governor from 1991 to 1999 and U.S. senator from 2000 to 2005. Miller is remembered throughout Georgia as architect of an education lottery that has financed pre-kindergarten programs for 1.6 million children cumulatively, 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 condemned his own inaction and fought, unsuccessfully, to remove Confederate insignia from the Georgia 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 same-sex marriage and in 2004, he backed the re-election of Bush, the former Republican president who will eulogize him Tuesday. Begala gave a nod to some paradoxes, a “career politician” who campaigned “like an outsider,” a “deeply devoted Christian” who cursed like the Marine that he was. Recalling Miller’s explanation — “My family is more important than my party — Begala joked: “Which is true, because he only had one family.” Miller never did switch parties. “She’d say, ‘Zell … from here, you can get to anywhere in the world.” “Yes, Ms. Birdie,” Begala said.