'We Need to Heal'

I would hope that the first and sustained effort would be an element of healing within our country--reaching out to the other side quite openly and in a generous way that might antagonize some of one's own supporters. On an international basis, I would like to see the successful candidate--whether it is Bush or Kerry--begin to make moves toward the international community to join us in dealing with terrorism. We've pretty well abandoned the terrorist fight in order to concentrate our efforts in Iraq, which is kind of a quagmire now. We've got to be generous in sharing authority and responsibility in Iraq. I don't mean just offering people a right to send in troops, which is a hopeless offer, but to share with them the political and economic and the military future of Iraq. That's almost an unacceptable thing to say if you start including oil--[that] we're going to share the rights to controlling Iraqi oil with other nations. Are we going to share the right to shape Iraq's political identity or character with other nations? That has to be done in my opinion.

But shouldn't the Iraqi oil belong to the Iraqi people?

Sure, but control of it is what I'm talking about: the drilling for it, the marketing of it, those kind of things should be shared and not exclusively [be] a United States possession, which it is now--and which may have been one of the purposes of the invasion.

You were the last Democrat to sweep the South. Kerry's not expected to win a single state in the South except maybe Florida, which isn't really the South anymore. What did the Democrats do wrong?

It's a hard thing for me to say frankly. There's always a racist connotation and has been since the time of Goldwater, [who] I might hasten to add was not a racist. But the Republicans have latched on to [what some see as] the superiority of the white male citizens, and they have milked that for all it's worth. In some cases, that has permeated also the religious communities ... The religious community throughout the country is heavily oriented toward Bush--at least the evangelicals--and they have elevated the issue of homosexuality or homophobia, whatever you want to call it, to a position of extreme importance ... All those things are intertwined, and I think they have permeated the Southern constituency.

What does the defection of Zell Miller to the Republicans without changing his party label say to voters in swing states, where he's campaigning with the president.