Before he went to Yale Law School, Joe Miller LAW ’95 went rogue.
An underdog who beat the incumbent Republican to win the nomination for U.S. Senate in Alaska, Miller began his educational career at West Point and went on to serve as a tank commander in the Gulf War, where he earned a Bronze Star. His military service — and his staunch conservative views — won him support from such Tea Party titans as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, but both neglected to mention in their endorsements that Miller earned a degree from America’s most selective and, as critics might say, elitist law school.
In a recent interview with the News, however, Miller distanced himself from the Tea Party.
“The Tea Party has endorsed me, but I don’t see myself as anything other than a constitutional conservative,” he said. “I look at this country as being at a crisis. The entitlement state is broken, and I think we’ve got to get a different answer to where we are today.”
Throughout Miller’s recent but conspicuous arrival on the national stage, little attention has focused on his time at Yale, a law school at once known for being overwhelming liberal and also for producing prominent conservative minds. While Miller’s Ivy League credentials may seem to clash with the Tea Party movement’s populist ethos, Miller identified his law school years as a formative stage in his life, just as he suggested that the Tea Party might not best define his political persona.
Miller, for his part, also refuted the notion of the Tea Party movement as anti-intellectual.
“That’s a misperception of the [Tea Party] movement across the United States,” he said. “Even though some people might say it’s a move against intellectualism, I think it’s a commonsense movement. … People recognize that fiscally, the country can’t continue in the way it’s going.”
Read the full story at the Yale Daily News.
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