Forget everything you think you know about Joe Miller. There’s no doubt that he has an elite educational pedigree, honorable military record, and unimpeachable legal and judicial background; and there’s also no doubt that mistakes were made along the way during the 2010 campaign. But the chatter coming from left-wing media and some local talk radio about what a “deeply flawed candidate” or “shady character” Joe Miller was makes apparent that they had no clue what they were talking about. Most were parroting the “conventional wisdom” of ruling class pundits, and some were “just making things up.” The narrative created and spun by Joe’s opponents and their eager accomplices in the media would bear no resemblance to reality. The foil played out before our eyes was nothing more or less than the Establishment’s hack job on the Tea Party-backed Republican Nominee for the US Senate from Alaska, a performance that I’m sure would have done Tonya Harding proud. What transpired was a first-rate political “knee capping.” It was pure unadulterated political theater. And without a doubt, it was nefarious.
In a post-election conversation, our Attorney Tom Van Flein would lament the injustice of the smearing of a good man. I agreed. But what we both found equally disturbing was what this successful character assassination might portend for future candidates, and whether it would cause men and women of good faith to abandon public service.
On a late February day in 2011, I sat across the table from some of my compatriots at the Village Inn on Northern Lights Boulevard in Anchorage. We were still grappling with what had happened in the 2010 Senate race. Having all worked closely with Joe, we felt like we knew him quite well. So I decided to pose a question, “Campaign rhetoric aside,” I said, “how would you describe Joe Miller to someone who didn’t know him?” Without hesitation, Dirk Moffatt brought up the Fairbanks North Star Borough computer incident. It was the worst thing they had on Joe. He had been castigated during the campaign for it, but Dirk thought it revealed something more telling about the man’s character, something positive. To a fair person who knew the facts, it was the only blemish on Joe’s public record that bordered on legitimacy. He had, in fact, used several borough computers during the lunch hour one day to vote in an online poll relating to Republican Party politics, on his own personal website. But having said that it was a real violation of borough policy to engage in a political exercise, and of professional ethics to access a co-worker’s computer, one also had to admit that however inappropriate and sophomoric the stunt had been, it was anything but the serious crime it had been portrayed to be in the media. Suggesting that it was anything more than a minor peccadillo was not only unfair, it was tantamount to bearing false witness against one’s neighbor.
The more serious side of the offense had been his denial to co-worker’s that he had used their computers, and not being forthright about what it was that he was up to. We got it; it was embarrassing. But what we also knew, that the public didn’t, and our professional handlers didn’t want us talking about, was the rest of the story. It had been conveniently left out. Joe had not been forced into a confession at all, as some had reported. About ten minutes after his initial denial, and a brief phone conversation about the scenario with his father in Kansas, who was a former member of the clergy, he came clean on his own because he feared that one of his co-workers might be punished for his “crime.” He would later write to Rene Broker, his boss at the borough, “I acknowledge that my access to others’ computers was wrong, participating in the poll was wrong, lying was wrong, and there is absolutely no excuse for any of it.” Broker noted that she believed that the incident was indicative of “an isolated event,” not a pattern of behavior.
Joe apparently felt so bad about what he had done that he voluntarily proffered his resignation. After recounting the incident, Dirk laughed. “The guy’s a boy scout,” he said. “Who does that?” The Borough hadn’t judged it a serious enough offense to fire him, and wouldn’t accept his resignation. Even if that is all the information one was privy to, it seemed to me that it begged the question, how serious could it have possibly been?
As I pondered the whole incident, a story from ecclesiastical history resurfaced into my consciousness. It was of the 16th Century English Reformer Thomas Cranmer, who had fraudulently signed a denial of his true beliefs in the presence of his captors to avoid being burned at the stake. Only later did he recant his recantation. As the story is told, when he eventually faced the fire, he would convince a guard to leave the hand that signed the fraudulent document free so it could be the first to burn for its offenses. For this and other things, he became a hero and martyr to The Church of England.
I’m not suggesting Joe Miller is a saint, or a martyr. Neither am I justifying what he did. I’m merely pointing out that committing a sin may make a man a sinner, but it does not necessarily make him a villain. We all make mistakes. The measure of a man is not whether he makes mistakes, but what he does with the mistakes that he has made. In my view, Joe Miller had passed with flying colors.
During the waning days of the campaign, the Borough affair seemed to be a cloud of doubt hanging over us. Folks were left with the impression that somehow, this one incident was the final commentary on Joe’s life; a rather strange assumption in light of our cultural credo, “judge not.”
There’s no doubt that we should have won anyway. The strategy employed in the general election was a loser from the start, as I was wont to point out early and often, though it fell upon deaf ears. But I’m still stuck with the nagging thought that everything may yet have been different had folks actually known the Joe Miller that his family and friends knew.
I recall Kathleen Miller, Joe’s wife, telling me how she and Joe met. As a newly single mother, fresh out of a messy and abusive relationship, she placed an ad in a local Kansas newspaper in an attempt to get rid of one of her dogs, a golden retriever named Maverick. She was going to live with her mother, and it just wasn’t possible to keep both of her dogs. Having received several calls, but reluctant to say goodbye to her canine friend, she deferred a decision on the adoption. But before she could act, Maverick was hit by a car and would need extensive surgery to fuse one of her legs. It would be weeks before Maverick would walk again, and afterwards she always walked with a limp.
Some weeks later, upon his return from the Gulf War, Joe happened upon Kathleen’s ad in an old newspaper someone had left in the barracks at Ft. Riley. He called to inquire whether she still had the dog. She explained that she did, but that Maverick had been badly injured. She would be permanently affected by the accident. Joe assured her that it didn’t matter, he wanted the dog anyway. Kathleen agreed to give Maverick up for adoption.
Fortuitously, she had forgotten something though – the papers. Joe later called back for Maverick’s papers, and when he arrived to pick them up, they struck up a conversation. Joe offered to take Kathleen and her two toddlers out for pizza and a trip to the local Dairy Queen. Thus began a friendship that would go the distance.
It was moving to hear Kathleen tell of Joe’s interest her little family and their situation, in spite of the fact that he had a number of other romantic options that might have been more suitable for an unattached West Point graduate fresh home from the war. But Joe was undeterred by the extra responsibility. He would accept her children as his own, and the rest, as they say, is history. They now have a total of eight children and it is apparent that their family bonds are a source of strength for them.
One of the frustrations of his political handlers was getting Joe to project his inner warmth. He’s not a good poseur, and his public persona is sometimes a little cold. That would often lead critics to conclude that he was arrogant, aloof, or perhaps self-important.
During one photo shoot for an ad, his youngest daughter would interrupt the shoot by running into the middle of everything and jumping into her daddy’s arms. He lit up. And the videographer stopped. Campaign Chair Bernadette Wilson lamented that we didn’t get it on video. That’s exactly what we needed from Joe, but couldn’t get in the sterile atmosphere of a studio shoot.
We did a pretty good job of conveying Joe’s resume but a deplorable job of giving folks insight into Joe Miller the man. There is so much more to him. The public portrait that most folks had could not have comprehended the family man; the man of faith who served on the board of elders at his church; the public servant who had taken a pay cut to move into government; the avid outdoorsman who made spending time out in the wilderness with his boys a priority; the altruist who crossed the ocean to help take medical assistance to the Third World; the many hours of pro bono work given up for folks with legal troubles who had no money to pay; the innovative Magistrate who formed the State’s first Therapeutic Court; or the young lawyer who frequented the Downtown Anchorage Soup Kitchen to assist the homeless on lunch breaks and days off at the firm. That Joe Miller, the public knew nothing of and the media didn’t talk about.
If such things had been part of his opponent’s record, I suspect the media would be lobbying the Pope for canonization of their favorite Statist. After all, The Anchorage Daily News all but beautified her for having flunked the bar exam four times, something that would make any conservative unfit for the United States Senate.
Joe had grown up “dirt poor” and had a real empathy for those less fortunate than himself. His desire to serve had earlier taken him to West Point, and later induced him to leave the private practice of law to serve in a public capacity for significantly less money. But none of that mattered. For many liberals, serving in government is much to be preferred over private enterprise anyway, and is therefore not seen as sacrifice. And we all know that private charity is a non-starter for those who view government as divine.
I still remember the financial disclosures coming back on Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden during the 2008 Presidential race. I can’t tell you how it chapped me to hear their sanctimonious lectures to the American people about sacrifice, when the record revealed that they had contributed only a pittance to charity. The spectacle of two rich cats preaching moral do-goodism when they had each given less than I had on a salary of less than forty thousand dollars was just too much for me. Similarly, the media assumed that Joe Miller was just a mean and hypocritical ogre when he suggested the government would have to rein in spending on social programs, and reform the ones that weren’t solvent, just to keep the government from going bankrupt. To them, it was proof positive that the man was a misanthrope. Never mind the facts.
For some reason it seems to never have dawned on these people that giving a dollar to one’s neighbor in need might be more productive than the Federal Government taking that same dollar, withholding a percentage for administrative costs, then passing it on to State and Local governments to do the same, only to wind up back on the neighbor’s doorstep as forty cents. And it is indeed a queer anthropology that insists that men are inherently good, but cannot be counted on to care for their neighbors. The same people would look down their noses at those of us who still believe in the Judeo-Christian philosophy, which affirms that man is fallen, as somehow backward – even though we affirm that there is a capacity for goodness in human beings sufficient that, more times than not, they’ll do the right thing without government intervention.
It wasn’t like the kid from small-town Kansas who ate soy beans when he was growing up, just to have enough protein, was unacquainted with the plight of the poor. He understood poverty. But he also knew there were pressing issues facing the country; potential circumstances that don’t portend good things for the very people the big spenders profess to want to help.
With a sovereign debt crisis looming on the horizon, it was just common sense to suggest that programs would have to be cut. Nothing has changed. The fact remains that the future does not bode well for the poorest among us if Washington doesn’t exercise a little bit of self-control. Spending cuts are inevitable. The question before us is whether those necessary cuts will come in a time and manner of our own choosing, or whether we will be forced into a situation where there are few, if any, good choices. The fact that the FY11 budget included a record deficit of $1.65 trillion and a $137 billion increase in discretionary spending and Congress has yet to pass a viable FY12 budget tends to leave one with the impression that Washington still doesn’t get it.
During the campaign, Joe had taken a lot of abuse over his signing of a pledge not to ask for earmarks that didn’t go through an extensive vetting process. His insistence that the gig was up on earmarks seemed to be offensive to some folks, in spite of the fact that he was spot on. It didn’t matter to the crony capitalists that Joe Miller happened to be telling the truth; they would attack him for it just because they didn’t want to hear it. It was a puerile game. Lisa Murkowski was at the front of the line of bashers, falsely promising to bring home the bacon for Alaska. It may have been a desperate and disingenuous ploy, but it would be her calling card for the general election, despite the fact that she had just spent several months trying to sell Republicans on the fact that she was a conservative fighting to rein in federal spending.
Ironically, a few short months after the election, Murkowski began singing Joe Miller’s tune, telling Alaskans that they would have to learn to live without earmarks. Joe Miller predicted at the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce debate in 2010 that it didn’t matter who was elected, it was simply a matter of fact that “the era of earmarks is dead.” Now that the US House, Senate Republicans, and President Obama have all agreed to swear off earmarks, and Governor Parnell has stated publicly that he won’t be asking for any, Senator Murkowski has finally shown up to the party. And not a single word from the media about the whole phony affair.
I will not soon forget Murkowski’s indignation at the suggestion that she wasn’t a “real Republican.” She spent the primary election denying, and trying to sidestep, the fact that she had taken more than 300 votes on the Senate floor against the majority in her own party. At a Fairbanks meeting in April she went so far as to suggest that they had perhaps been committee votes, or overwhelmingly bipartisan measures. Not true. In the general election she bragged of having crossed the aisle more than 300 times to vote for bipartisan measures, embraced traditional Democrat constituencies, hired Democrat strategists, appointed prominent State Democrats to key positions in her campaign, embraced Obama’s mantras (“Yes we can!” and “Let’s make history!”), and openly pandered to the Democratic base.
Joe Miller was prescient. He saw right through Murkowski, and she knew it. I suspect that’s why she harbors such hatred for him. As Joe predicted, she would go on to vote with the Obama Administration on every major piece of his lame duck agenda, the only Republican in the United States Senate to do so. And if Obama is able to fully recover from his 2010 humbling and win re-election in 2012, Murkowski will surely bear a heavy weight of responsibility for his political resurgence.
In the end, I suspect Joe Miller will be proved right on a whole host of issues, including 8(a) Reform and Obamacare. Senator Claire McCaskill (MO) has proposed legislation in the United States Senate to reform significant portions of the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program for minority preference. And in spite of the fact that Murkowski was forced to take a symbolic vote for repeal of Obamacare, there were signs that she had already began to cave by February 2011 when she openly criticized her colleagues’ repeal vote as a “waste of time.” Then in early March 2011 she declined to sign on to a Republican letter asking the President to withdraw his recess appointment of Don Berwick as CMS Administrator. Berwick is an outspoken critic of free market health care solutions, and a strong advocate for single payer European-style government-run health care.
Lisa Murkowski may have “made” history, but Joe Miller was on the right side of history. In the end, human experience has a way of crushing our illusions and purifying our perspectives. The truth always prevails, and I suspect it will vindicate Joe Miller.
