For Alaska’s restive right, it’s Joe Miller time

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.”

Miller took an internship in Anchorage, and after graduation, faced with the traditional Ivy League option of a lucrative job at an East Coast law firm, he chose to head to the natural beauty, frontier spirit — and wide-open politics — of the 49th state. He took a job with a law firm in Anchorage.

Later, he served as a state and federal magistrate, acting district judge and a deputy attorney for Fairbanks’ North Star Borough. In recent years, he has been running his own law practice and completing a master’s in economics at the University of Alaska.

The family, now with eight children, ages 7 to 21, lives on 20 acres outside of Fairbanks. The youngest of the children attend the Christian school where Kathleen teaches. Miller, who resembles a lumberjack with his rugged good looks and shadowy beard, often goes hunting and boating with the chief pastor and board members at his nondenominational Friends Community Church, Fairbanks’ largest congregation.

“He and I and the pastor’s wife — she’s a professor of economics at the university — spend a lot of time talking about our view of the economy: lower taxes, less government spending, freeing up the market to create jobs and to be the engine of the economy,” said Brian Bennett, assistant pastor.

Miller ran for the state Legislature in 2004 against Democrat David Guttenberg and lost by 3.5 percentage points.

Guttenberg said Miller seemed to have little interest in talking about how to fix Alaska’s social and development problems. “It became obvious how absolutely arrogant this guy was,” Guttenberg said. “All he cares about is his constitutional gobbledygook.... He’s on track to become emperor of the universe.”

Miller alienated many moderate Republicans when, backed by the Tea Party Express, he attacked Murkowski and her voting record on the federal healthcare reform bill. When Murkowski launched brief discussions with the Libertarian Party about joining its ticket after her loss, a Miller staffer, purportedly without the candidate’s authorization, sent a Twitter message: “What’s the difference between selling out your party’s values and the oldest profession?”

Later, Miller apologized, saying he meant it was the party, not Murkowski, who was for sale. But many of the senator’s supporters, particularly women, were distraught.

“There are Lisa supporters who have been in tears the last few days,” said Rhonda Boyles, who isn’t among them. Boyles, who is vice president of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women and was mayor of Fairbanks when Miller was hired on as an attorney, counts herself as a onetime moderate who has hurtled to the right since President Obama’s election.

“Both my husband and I, we’re both business people, and we are very, very afraid for where our country is headed. We see people like Joe as having the ability to make a change,” Boyles said.

She predicted Miller would adopt a more collaborative style if elected, but noted, “He’s a tank commander. And he’s out to win.”

Miller did not hesitate to fire his campaign manager, Paul Bauer, 11 days before the primary when Bauer’s wife was captured in an iPhone video at an Anchorage pub, aiming a profanity-laced tirade at a group of college Republicans and a talk show host she believed had unfairly impugned her husband.

“Wife of Joe Miller’s campaign manager caught on tape threatening to bury talk show host alive” was one of the headlines on a local news website.

Through it all, Miller has kept his eye on his vision of the future: a country in peril of collapsing under the expanding federal debt.

“By some estimates, 40% of our economy is derived in some sense by the federal government,” he said. “But I think Alaskans are common-sense folk, and they recognize that the insolvent position we’re in as a nation can’t be perpetuated.”

kim.murphy@latimes.com