Michael Barone's take on "Give 'Em Hell" Zell's speech.

Michael Barone is one of the most well-respected political commentators around today. Here are a few excerpts. (Read the whole commentary here).

Until Wednesday night, I was under the impression that Andrew Jackson had died in 1845. But on Wednesday night he appeared at the podium of the Republican National Convention under the guise of Georgia Senator and former Governor Zell Miller...

Zell Miller is, technically, a Democratic colleague of John Kerry in the United States Senate. But in his speech Miller took as dead an aim at Kerry as Jackson did against the man who impugned his wife’s honor and, like Jackson, hit his target. “There is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust [my family’s] future, and his name is George Bush.” And he does not cotton well to politicians who for political reasons call our soliders names...

[H]e was appalled by the partisanship of Tom Daschle’s Democratic Caucus. Since he became Democratic leader in 1994... It was a game Zell Miller did not want to play...

Then came September 11. Daschle rallied to support Bush in September, but by December was holding up the economic stimulus bill by his effective partisan tactics. Then, as the focus shifted toward Iraq, Senate Democrats laid the predicate for undermining Bush’s policies. This Miller evidently identified as something close to treason. And he saw the Senate Democrats rooting against American success. As he said in Madison Square Garden, “Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.”...

In 2003 and 2004 Democratic politicians, infected by their and their staffers’ recollection of their versions of what happened in Vietnam, engaged in systematic denigration of our military efforts in Vietnam. The Democratic convention in Boston seated in President Carter’s box Michael Moore, who called those attacking American forces in Iraq freedom fighters who should and would win. The charge that leading Democrats wish that American forces fail in the hopes that it will help their political chances is well founded...

That is something Andrew Jackson would never stomach. Nor will Zell Miller... [who] was careful to say that he was attacking not the patriotism but the judgment of John Kerry; the only politicians who have attacked their opponents of unpatriotism this campaign year have been Democrats like Wesley Clark and Howard Dean—both still trotted out regularly as surrogates for the Kerry-Edwards campaign.