Behind the Gentle Manner, a Dogged Advocate

For someone with a reputation as a plain-vanilla, middle-of-the-road Midwesterner, Iowa Atty. Gen. Tom Miller has managed to get himself mixed up in some of the nation’s biggest and thorniest legal confrontations.

The 61-year-old Democrat has served as a point man in multi-state investigations that helped extract huge payouts from tobacco companies and other big-name corporations, including Microsoft Corp. and Household International Inc.

Miller’s easygoing manner and experience in big cases made him a natural choice to serve as lead negotiator for 49 states and the District of Columbia in talks with Ameriquest Mortgage Co. of Orange, which was accused of predatory mortgage lending practices. The company agreed last week to a $325-million settlement but did not admit to a pattern of wrongdoing.

“He’s the best attorney general in the country,” said California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, who said Miller sets himself apart with his work ethic and ability to tackle problems methodically. “He is very patient and low-key, but very dogged.”

Miller, who was in Los Angeles to formally announce the settlement, said facing a rich, politically connected firm such as Ameriquest was a “somewhat daunting experience.”

But he said his job as attorney general required him to look out for consumers who might not have the means to defend themselves. He said he knew that many of the people who had been hurt by Ameriquest’s practices “work very hard, two or three jobs at a time. They have no economic cushion or safety valve.”

Some question whether, in some instances, Miller has been aggressive enough in negotiating with companies on consumers’ behalf.

The National Assn. of Consumer Advocates, an attorneys’ group, and the National Consumer Law Center blasted Miller’s office last year for a $40-million settlement it negotiated after State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. admitted it had resold salvaged vehicles without disclosing that they’d been in serious wrecks.

The groups complain that Miller’s staff did little investigation, taking the company’s word on the number of vehicles involved and then crafting a nationwide “sweetheart deal” that shielded the company from the risks of much bigger payouts from private lawsuits.

“They were hoodwinked by State Farm,” says Ira Rheingold of the Consumer Advocates group. “All the other attorneys general signed on, saying, ‘Iowa’s doing it, it must be OK.’ ”

Still, “it pains me to say anything bad about Tom Miller,” Rheingold said. “We should have more AGs like him.”

Miller said he fights hard to get the best outcomes for consumers. In the State Farm case, he said, his office did its “due diligence” and continued to believe that the settlement was good for everyone involved.

“Our job is not to be unfair or try and push to the limit what companies pay,” Miller said. “We have a responsibility to be balanced and make judgments, and that’s what we did there.”

Miller said leading multi-state cases is “more an art than a science,” because they bring together varied personalities from various attorneys general offices and regulatory agencies.

He acknowledged that in the Ameriquest case, representatives from some states believed that $325 million wasn’t enough to punish the highly profitable company for its misdeeds.

As lead attorney general in the case, Miller said, he had to “work through the many strong opinions in our family.”

“I had to look out for the whole group and see: ‘How do we stay together as a group? How do we reach agreement at a place that’s in the public interest?’ That’s what I tried to do and I think that we ended up there.”

The nation’s longest-serving attorney general, Miller says he learned the value of public service from his father, a high school dropout who studied hard to qualify for appointment as county assessor in Dubuque.

Miller, who is married with a grown son, has served as attorney general since 1978, except for a four-year stint in private practice. That came after his campaign for governor failed in the 1990 Democratic primary.

This year he’s running for reelection, seeking a seventh term as Iowa’s top lawyer. And he’s continuing, he said, to look for significant cases that affect consumers inside and outside Iowa.