Joe Miller

Joe Miller concedes. But is there victory in defeat?

1231-miller-concedesThe communique-driven media relations of former Gov. Sarah Palin were gone Friday when protege Joe Miller met the Alaska media to bring to an end a long and bitter campaign for one of the state's two U.S. Senate seats.

Miller held what used to be called a "press conference" in an empty, 20-by-80-foot room in a Midtown Anchorage strip mall between a sub-sandwich joint and a pizzeria. He stood behind a podium in front of fake, fluted pillars and the flags of Alaska and the United States to read a speech, and when he was done he actually conferenced.

It was a big change from his last previous encounter with Alaska reporters when he called a conference at the Dena'ina Center downtown and then arrived to spit -- figuratively not literally -- in their faces. At that gathering, Miller told Alaska reporters he wasn't going to answer any more of their questions about his past; accused some of them of being out to get him; and then scurried out the backdoor of the building.

From then on in a unique twist on Palin's approach, as well as other tea party candidates, toward what they call the "lamestream media,'' Miller would talk only to the national reporters of conservative Fox News, liberal CNN and even leftist MSNBC. His only contacts with most of Alaska's media were through spokesman Randy DeSoto, whose answer to almost everything was nothing, and Anchorage talk show host Dan Fagan who became the de facto propaganda minister for Miller for Senate, although Fagan's propagandizing did begin to diminish after Miller started tipping legal windmills in the wake of his election loss to write-in candidate and incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

RELATED: What's next for Joe Miller?

Miller formally gave up that jousting on Friday in front of the press, but still felt moved to defend it, arguing it was all about clean elections and noting some Alaska lawmakers are now talking about new statutory language to clarify what voters might write down on a ballot to make their write-in desires clear. At this moment, the view of the state Division of Elections -- as unanimously endorsed by the Alaska Supreme Court -- is that a ballot will be counted if the voters intent is clear.

Thus, Alaska voters faced with a spelling challenge like Smythe, one of those strange variations on the spelling of Smith, can write the latter and still see their vote count. Or they can, as they did this year, write Merkowski or Murcowski, or Murcowsky and still score a vote for Murkowski. It is, however, worth noting that Alaska voters did smarter than all of the pundits expected prior to this election, and even after the misspellings of Murkowski were placed in reserve pending the outcome of post-election lawsuits by Miller, there were a couple thousand more people who'd managed to spell Murkowski right than had merely colored an oval next to Miller's name.

On Friday, Miller blamed entrenched powers and monied Alaska interests, most notably Native corporations, wanting to protect the economic status quo for turning the Murkowski spelling bee into a Murkowski campaign victory, but his accusations did not carry the venom of the past nor did his behavior. During the election campaign, Miller became nationally famous as the candidate whose personal security guards manhandled and then handcuffed Alaska Dispatch editor Tony Hopfinger because he was judged to be pursuing Miller too aggressively with questions.

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There was no security visible when Miller met the media this time. He arrived with his wife in a SUV a few minutes behind schedule. He rushed in the strip mall's front door, past reporters and a throng of TV cameras and disappeared into the back of the small space.

Some were left wondering if a replay of the Dena'ina disaster was in the work, but it wasn't. After a five-minute wait that seemed longer, Miller re-emerged to step behind the lectern, apologize for reading a speech, and then read line-by-line his statement on why he was finally giving up his lawsuits and quitting the race.

Afterward, the a Yale-educated lawyer by way of West Point took questions willingly, even a couple tough ones, and handled them with aplomb. When his supporters tried to shout down a reporter who asked about the possibility that Miller's actions might have alienated the political center, Miller silenced them. The question, he said, was fair and deserved an answer.

He did not attack the reporter for bias, but he did play to the many supporters in the room. He said he thought his message was good, and the support from within Alaska for the message still strong. The comments echoed what he said while reading the speech. He hammered away then at how 90,000 Alaskans had rallied to his cause of cutting the size of the federal government, even though Alaska's economy is heavily dependent on federal spending.

He did not mention that those 90,000 votes accounted for only about one in every three Alaska voters. Two-thirds of Alaskans turned against Miller to vote for Murkowski or Democrat Scott McAdams, the choice of the party faithful and those Democrats who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Murkowski because of how she got the job. She was appointed by her father, Gov. Frank Murkowski, who quit as U.S. senator to become governor only to turn around and name his daughter to the very seat he had vacated. Some in Alaska -- even among those who say they like the daughter more than the father as senator -- can't get past that.


1231-miller-supportersAnd yet, everyone agrees, a whole bunch of Democrats or Democrat-sympathizing independents put that behind them to join a bunch of Republicans and Republican-sympathizing independents who went into election booths to write in M-U-R-K-O-W-S-K-I on election day.

That they did can be blamed in large part on the self-destruction of the Miller campaign. A huge, surprise winner by a couple of thousand votes in the Republican primary, Miller was at one time thought to be a Senate shoo-in.

And then things started to come apart.

Questions were raised about whether he'd been fired from his job as a part-time attorney in Fairbanks. Miller denied that, but it was left unclear as to why then he left and why his former bosses at the Fairbanks North Star Borough seemed so unhappy with their ex-employee.

Rumors started to circulate that the outspoken critic of federal funding for almost anything had once solicited and accepted farm subsidies. DeSoto answered questions about that by saying Miller had never received subsidies for his Alaska farm land, but as it turned out, Miller had been getting federal farm subsidies mailed to him in Alaska for farm land he owned in Kansas. His defense to that was that farm subsidies were the only way he could afford to buy the property.

Worse followed. It turned out Miller's wife has applied for and accepted unemployment, something Miller had come out against. He arrogantly tweeted (something later blamed on a campaign worker) about looking for an office and furniture in Washington, D.C. It was revealed Miller had obtained a low-income hunting and fishing license for Alaska residents when he was neither a legal Alaska resident nor apparently indigent; he'd just bought a house in Anchorage and was spending significant money to remodel it at the time. He insisted that whatever he'd done had happened long in the past, and that if he'd done it, it must have been legal at the time.

Afterward, the problems only continued. Miller, it was discovered, had failed to report to the Federal Election Commission property near Willow he had tied up in some sort of murky trust. The staunch fiscal conservative was found to have taken advantage of federally funded programs for health and child care. The land he'd bought near Delta with the state-backed loan designed to encourage farming had never been farmed, and Miller expressed no interest in farming it, despite a requirement of sale that he provide a farm plan. No one ever saw the plan; the state said it was not legally allowed to release it, and Miller wasn't about to do so. It was one of the many things he thought private.

"We've drawn a line in the sand,'' he said the day he turned his back on the Alaska media. "You can ask me about background, you can ask about personal issues -- I'm not going to answer.''

RELATED: Read more Joe Miller coverage

Meanwhile, the rear guard action he'd been trying to fight on those Fairbanks personnel records started to fail.

Miller started off saying he wanted to release the records to settle once and for all the issue of why he'd left his job in Fairbanks, but he quietly battled every attempt by the borough to find a way to do so. Finally, the Dispatch brought suit under the state public records law. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and eventually the Anchorage Daily News joined in.

DeSoto said Friday the suit was what irreparably poisoned Miller's deteriorating relationship with the Alaska media. Miller, who'd repeatedly said he wanted the records released, ended up entering the lawsuit in an effort to block their release. When Hopfinger tried to press him on why, the handcuffs came out.

From then on, Miller's relationship with the media was part of the Senate campaign story. Miller's response was to continue to stonewall reporters and question their motives. When the open line on a cell phone caught some KTVA-TV staffers gossiping like teenagers about what bad things could possibly happen at a Miller political rally in Anchorage, the Miller campaign tried to turn them into poster children for what Miller saw as a media conspiracy to derail what had once been his fast track to power.

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It was a plan modeled on the strategy of failed vice presidential candidate and political mentor Sarah Palin.

The strategy failed miserably for Miller. It was in trouble from the start, and it blew up in the candidate's face when a judge's order released the personnel records the Dispatch had been forced to court to obtain. They revealed Miller had been trying to hide misbehavior.

The borough had caught him campaigning on borough time, something frowned upon for public workers in Alaska. He'd sneaked into the computers of coworkers -- a possible crime -- to vote in an online poll he'd started on his own website in an effort to unseat the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party. More was to follow. Former coworkers emboldened by the records dump began to talk about the paranoia Miller suffered while working in Fairbanks; he'd once expressed fear Alaska Republican Party chairman Randy Ruedrich was trying to kill him.

Ruedrich, long an adversary of Palin, had been accused of many things in Alaska over the years, but that was a new one.

Miller's response to being accused of paranoia appeared to be to act paranoid. He fled the Alaska press. He spent most of election night on Nov. 2 sequestered in a small room with his family off to the side of a downtown Anchorage restaurant as he watched a Senate race he'd once been a shoo-in to win go to the woman he'd beaten in the Republican primary only months before. As soon it was clear the vote had gone against him, he started filing lawsuits and sending off communiques to the media to whom he still wasn't talking.

But you have to say this for Joe Miller; he apparently learned from all of this. It was a different man who met the Alaska media Friday.

In his speech, he used the word "statesman,'' and he tried to act like it, even if it was pretty clear that was not what his supporters wanted.

The women in ankle-length dresses and head scarves, and the men in wool and denim who'd labored for Miller valiantly during the bitter campaign, vocally didn't like the idea of moving toward the center.

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They repeatedly interrupted the media briefing with shouts or cheers when Miller stumped for conservative values. When the former candidate, a man of middle-class means and past financial struggles, was asked how he was supporting himself now and why he hadn't taken a salary from the campaign, one supporter shouted that while a salary might have been legally allowed it would have been morally wrong.

As if maybe Scott McAdams is the devil because he took a salary from his campaign when he was away from his job running for office? If candidates of average means don't take salaries, how are they to support themselves? Bags of cash handed them under the table by backers?

Miller supporters, for better or worse, are the people of black and white. American politics is a bunch of grays. This is both its beauty and its ugliness. Americans disagree on a lot of things, but they agree on more. The latter is all that holds together a tenuous democracy. Miller and DeSoto clearly must understand this. They went to West Point. Counter-insurgency might not have been the biggest topic of discussion when they were there then, but anyone with connections to the military -- and West Pointers never lose those connections -- are familiar with what a hot topic counter-insurgency is now.

And counter insurgency is about nothing but the grassroots of American politics. You win by forging coalitions. You win by making friends of enemies. You win by selling your ideas to willing buyers, not to accolades who try to force those ideas down the throats of others.

Miller has at least one good idea. No sensible America -- right or left -- can argue with his belief this country faces a debt crisis.

You can borrow yourself to seeming prosperity in the moment, but it will kill you, or your children, in the future.

Before the primary election, Miller talked earnestly about this. He was even willing to talk about something Palin would never venture to entertain -- cutbacks in military spending. Miller admitted that being tied down in Afghanistan at the cost of almost $200 million per day could bleed this country to death. And that is but one of the many budgetary problems facing this country because of its desire to do good deeds, both abroad and at home. Miller, who is at the moment unemployed and said he has no plans to reopen his law office, said his hope for the future is to find some role in which he can focus on this issue. Whether as pundit or politician, however, was unclear.

He said only this: "We're spending money we do not have. Now's the time for us engage in a national conversation.''

How Miller proposes to do that will be interesting to see. But it was nice to see him start by engaging with -- not fleeing from -- the Alaskans who are in the business of furthering the conversation. Maybe not on a national level, but at least on a regional one. It's pretty hard to convince those you disagree with that your ideas are good if you refuse to talk to them.

Read more Joe Miller coverage

Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.

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Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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