Monday afternoon, at a podium in the garden of his 2nd Street home, Dan Miller announced he would not be running for the office of Harrisburg mayor.
“With apologies to all those voters who supported me, especially those who wrote my name on their ballot, I have decided not to accept the Republican nomination,” Miller said. He was standing between rosebush hedges and a pink crape myrtle and reading from a prepared statement. His campaign manager, Chuck Ardo, began to distribute copies to the gathered press.
A moment later, as he answered questions, a campaign poster that had been taped to the podium popped loose and fell to the grass.
“How appropriate,” Miller said, smiling. He looked relieved.
Miller’s campaign for mayor had stalled in May, when he lost the Democratic primary to Eric Papenfuse, owner of the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. But Miller, who received 196 write-ins on the Republican side—sufficient to secure the nomination and appear on the fall ballot—spent the summer leaving spectators in doubt as to whether he’d actually run.
With Monday’s announcement, Miller marked not only the end of his campaign, but also the likely close of his nearly decade-long involvement in city politics. (Though he would not go so far as to say he would never seek office again, he said it was doubtful.) He leaves behind a commendable, if varied, legacy.
Miller was elected to City Council in 2005, where he served until he won city controller in 2009. In that time, his political persona evolved considerably.
During his run for council, he had seemed an uncontroversial and unifying figure. He was endorsed by both Mayor Reed and his opponent, Jason Smith, who was running a vicious counter-campaign for the Democratic nomination. Miller’s newsletters, often punctuated with exclamation points, were sprightly and optimistic. (“Please identify all your Republican friends and neighbors and ask them to write-in Dan Miller on May 17th,” one advised.)
In office, however, his persona hardened. He became one of Reed’s fiercest critics, taking him to task for his Western-artifacts fund and his use of the Harrisburg Authority as something like a personal mint for special projects. Often, his critiques seemed driven—predictably, given that Miller worked (and still works) full-time at Miller Dixon Drake, the Harrisburg accounting firm he founded—by a desire for transparency, accuracy, and detail.
A 2008 clip, for example, made available by Roxbury News, shows Miller questioning Mayor Reed over the sale of the Senators baseball team. Reed is typically evasive, but Miller hammers away, trying to get a firm answer on what happened to the money. When Reed repeats for a final time that he doesn’t know, Miller tersely states, “I think that’s the height of arrogance, and I’m outraged by it.” For people who watched Reed get away with so much for so long—and continue to deny, through the 2012 State Senate hearings, that he had any specific knowledge of how the city’s incinerator debt had so badly ballooned—it’s hard not to be thrilled by Miller’s persistence.
As city controller, at least at first, his stature as the city’s top watchdog began to rise. He created a separate website for his office, harrisburgcitycontroller.com, which was notably more reliable than the city’s own site and made financial reports and audits readily available to the public.
He frequently expressed a belief that transparency was critical to the city government’s health. He also publicly sparred with Mayor Thompson when, early in her term, she attempted to gag city employees, ordering that any outside requests for information be forwarded to her office.
So why did this defender of careful accounting, in a time when the city’s structural deficit and debt were spinning out of control, fail in his bid for mayor?
As Miller would have it, he was simply outspent. “Politics is about money,” he said Monday afternoon, “and we didn’t have the money.” Noting that the Papenfuse campaign spent upwards of $240,000, in contrast with his campaign’s $90,000, he complained about “oversized, full-color mail pieces and misleading TV ads.” In this sort of campaign environment, he said, the “issues took a back seat.”
It’s true that a great deal of money was spent, and that despite this, Miller was edged by a narrow margin—about 400 votes, out of around 6,500 cast. But there was more to his defeat than money.
The vigilance Miller brought to City Council and the controller’s office could come across, in debates, as spiteful and sour. He lamented the lack of an “honest debate on the pluses and minuses of bankruptcy,” but failed to make a palatable case for the pluses, especially in terms that lay voters could understand.
Besides that, Miller frequently skipped debates, often explaining his absence by reference to his full-time accounting job—a reasonable excuse, perhaps, but one that may have confused voters about his priorities. And while Papenfuse did indeed outspend him, he also out-campaigned him, going door to door, organizing street cleanups, and meticulously posting about his activities on Facebook and Twitter.
To observe Miller on his home turf—as I did on the night of the primary returns—is to understand why he was able to form as sizable a coalition of supporters as he did. That night, he was gracious, cheerful, and charming, even as it became clear that he was losing at the polls. But when it came to presenting a vision for the future, one that could both inspire and reassure, the scrutineer persona Miller had crafted proved limited. He was too intent on past failures, too ready to go on the attack.
The most telling moment at Monday’s conference may have come when Miller finished his script and looked up to take questions. His posture immediately relaxed, and he was smiling. (Later, he would say, in reference to the collapsing campaign sign, “That was great that that thing fell off at the end,” and laugh.)
He seemed to feel about the conference the way he’d come to feel about the race: happy it was over.
