Reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska — For campaign volunteer Amy Walker, the Republican U.S. Senate race in Alaska never was about money, so it didn't matter that Sen. Lisa Murkowski outspent her man several times over. Joe Miller, the 43-year-old Fairbanks lawyer who wrested the nomination from the influential incumbent, would show up in people's living rooms, she said, share a cup of coffee, and walk away with 20 votes.
"When they can meet you face-to-face and answer a question and look you in the eye, that is a powerful thing," said Walker, who coordinates volunteers in Alaska for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's political fundraising arm.
"Joe is very down-to-earth; he doesn't stand on ceremony.... And he is an absolutely rock-solid constitutional conservative."
Miller managed to do exactly what his political mentor, Sarah Palin, did four years earlier when she won the Alaska governorship: run outside the party hierarchy with a feisty network of committed, grass-roots volunteers. His conservative message rebuffs Alaska's traditional pork barrel politics that depend on billions of dollars in federal aid.
Miller, a graduate of West Point and Yale Law School, and — perhaps more telling in Alaska's contentious political environment these days — a decorated tank commander during the first Gulf War, says his volunteers' "sweat equity" won the nomination.
Now, he says, it's up to the public to take up the call for states' rights, dismantle the vast federal land and entitlement system, and return to "the good old days, when men were free and life was good," as he wrote in an election-eve letter to Alaska Republicans.
Miller wants to phase out Social Security and Medicare. He says Alaska can generate plenty of its own money if it takes control of the state's 178 million acres of federal lands — theoretically including such gems as Denali National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — for mining, timber, oil and gas development.
"We are at crisis point. I think anybody that sees this nation as being on stable economic or fiscal ground is fooling themselves," he said in an interview. "The entitlement state has driven us into insolvency."
This is extreme talk even for Alaska, where dreams are always writ large.
The Democrats, caught off guard by Murkowski's loss, flirted briefly with dumping their primary winner in favor of a better-known Democrat. But party leaders now say they are firmly set behind Scott McAdams, a former high school football coach who is mayor of the small tourist and fishing town of Sitka. Murkowski has been toying with the idea of joining the Libertarian Party ticket or mounting a write-in campaign, but the Republican Party is officially behind Miller.
The result is that two people many Alaskans had never heard of before this election season are now head to head in a race being watched like political reality TV — with a dose of fall moose hunts and bar shenanigans, because this is Alaska, after all.
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If Miller becomes Alaska's next U.S. senator, it will be his first elective office, but hardly the beginning of his considerable ambitions.
At his Salinas, Kan., high school, close to his father's Christian bookstore, he participated in debate and the student congress. He went on to West Point and deployed after graduating in 1989 as leader of a 15-member M1-A1 tank platoon sent to Saudi Arabia to drive Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait.
The young first lieutenant was entrusted with leading the 1st Combat Brigade's 93-mile road march that preceded the sweep into Iraq and Kuwait. His military evaluators described him as "the epitome of the combat arms platoon leader" and "a true warrior leader tested under fire."
After the war, Miller was accepted to law school at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago. The Army wanted to send him to a cheaper school, but Miller instead opted for early release and attended Yale on a scholarship, said Randy DeSoto, Miller's campaign spokesman, who attended the academy and armored warfare training with him.
Miller and his wife, Kathleen, who had two children from a previous marriage, one with Miller and one on the way, rented an attic in New Haven, Conn. Miller, a handyman, fashioned it into a livable apartment.
Gregory Feeley, who met Miller in New Haven, said they once discussed that year's presidential elections, when Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot were in a three-way race.
"He said very simply and very succinctly that all three of them were stupid. Absolutely stupid. He bore down on the word with obvious disdain in his voice," Feeley said. "It became very plain that he felt they were less intelligent than he was, and that was his criterion."
