A tale of two Zells - and his legacy.

Dick Pettys of the Associated Press has covered Georgia government and politics since 1970. It was my pleasure to get to know him this summer. He knows Georgia politics and its players.

His latest AP article:

A tale of two Zells - and his legacy

Maybe lifelong friend Ed Jenkins was onto something when he joked at a roast long ago that there were two Zell Millers: the Zell voters thought they knew and his twin, Ezell, the completely unpredictable one.

Never easy to pigeonhole, Miller switched positions so often over a political career spanning four decades that he has long been labeled "Zig-Zag Zell." A Democrat, he saved the biggest surprise of all for a career-capping four-year term in the U.S. Senate.

Biting the hand that fed him, he attacked his own party as out of touch with mainstream America, gave clutch support to major Republican initiatives in the Senate, and delivered the keynote GOP convention speech - and campaigned for - President Bush. But he didn't change parties.

"I learned a long time ago that in politics, you can be lukewarm and nimby-namby and nobody's going to hate you very much but nobody's going to love you very much. I've never been able to fit into that category," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

"I feel things strongly and people feel strongly about me, one way or the other."

Indeed, when he leaves office in January he will not find many friends among the Georgia Democrats who now suspect it was "Ezell" Miller - not Zell Miller - who went to Washington in 2000 to fill the seat of Republican Sen. Paul Coverdell.

And some worry that his legacy as one of Georgia's most successful governors in modern times will be tarnished by what they consider his subsequent antics in Washington.

"I would hope history would focus more on his accomplishments as governor because I think he had a greater impact on more people in that position than he did in the Senate - because of the nature of the jobs," said Atlanta lawyer Keith Mason, a top aide to Miller while he was governor and one of the Democrats who Miller has baffled.

Not everybody in Georgia has soured on Miller, though.

"You've got to give it to him. He says what he thinks," said Wilson Holloway, 49, of Albany after voting during the Nov. 2 election.

Kem Lowery, a 39-year-old Baptist minister who voted in Canton, said: "I think the man voted his conscience, not his party."

A former college professor, Miller was back in private life in 2000 after 24 years as lieutenant governor, governor and a series of political jobs before that. Then his successor, Democrat Roy Barnes, tapped him to fill the seat left vacant by Coverdell's death.

Reluctantly, he accepted, promising to serve neither party's interests but only those of Georgia voters. He was elected to the balance of the term later that year.

"I thought I'd serve the term out quietly and be a good Democrat like I've always been," Miller told The AP. "It was quite a shock to hear and see what I heard when I went to the Democratic Caucus. It was all about these policies that I knew were out of the mainstream, that I knew were not good for the country and not good for the party advocating them."

Always known as an independent sort, raised by a strong-willed widowed mother in the north Georgia mountains, Miller nevertheless caught sharp flak from the Democrats for his maverick behavior.

"I am convinced that if any of my main Democratic critics back here in Georgia had been in my shoes, they would have felt the same way that I did, and come to pretty much the same conclusions I did," he said.

Miller said that during his first two years in the Senate, "I wished every day I'd wake up and it would just be a bad dream," he said.

Then, he said, "I came to realize that I would have hated to live this life and died without really understanding how broken the process is in Washington. It is a wonderful city. I look up at that dome and get goose bumps every time I see it. It's not the city, it's not so much the people up there. It's the process that's broken."

Democrats took it on the chin nationally in the Nov. 2 election. At home, for the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans won majority control of both chambers of the Georgia statehouse.

Even after those setbacks for his party, Miller doesn't think Democrats will heed the message he's spread in speeches and in a best-selling book that the party has moved too far left.

"There will be a lot of talk ... but it will never happen. Not in my lifetime," he said, arguing that Democrats are too beholden to liberal special interest groups to move to what he considers center field. Too, he said, the party will continue nominating liberal presidential candidates as long as liberal states are front-loaded into the primaries.

While friends worry about how he will be remembered, Miller sounds unconcerned - strange as that may seem for a student and professor of history.

"I hadn't really thought about that," he protested. "I will always be very proud of what we were able to accomplish those eight years I was governor with the HOPE scholarship, pre-kindergarten, all the jobs that were created."

Still, he said, maybe historians "will kind of look at some of the votes (in Washington) that were so very important, like the first tax cut, homeland security, the John Ashcroft nomination - some of the things where I was the deciding vote or at least the first Democrat who spoke out in support of the Republican legislation. I don't know. I can't judge."

Emory University political science professor Merle Black said Miller will be remembered as an activist governor who left Georgia better than he found it and a senator "who wasn't there just to sit in the chair."

But partisans will have different views.

"For Democrats, it will be a very mixed legacy. They really liked how he behaved as governor, but a lot were very disappointed with his career in the Senate," Black said. "For a lot of Republicans and independents, Zell expressed a lot of the opinions they hold themselves."