Candidate profile: Brad Miller

Liberal Democrat Brad Miller, who is running for his fifth term as representative of North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District in Congress against tea party Republican Bill Randall, doesn’t make a distinction between his party base and the swing voters among his electorate, who live in Greensboro and Raleigh, along with several rural counties in between.

“I think what people are worried about is making the economy work,” Miller said in an interview today, “to have it work for people who are trying to make an honest living, not a tiny sliver of people who are trying to make a killing. Most people want to see manufacturing jobs come back.”

In the face of anxiety about the federal government’s ballooning deficit, Miller argues that job creation — which the Democratic Congress has tried to push through stimulus spending — is essential to bending the curve.

“I don’t accept that now is the new normal,” he said. “We’ve got to create jobs in our economy. We’ve got to have an adequate place in our economy for people who want to work. The most immediate thing to do is get small business lending available. Small business in every recession is where new jobs come from. I’ve worked for legislation to get small business lending available.”

With Republicans energized and many independents uneasy about the nation’s current path, the other challenge of Democratic candidates such as Miller is to rally their base and persuade them that this election matters.

“I think what’s frustrating is the economy is not working,” Miller conceded. “The people who are suffering the most are the most innocent in causing the financial crisis, and the people who are most culpable seem to have skated. It frustrates me, too.”

Miller said notwithstanding disappointment among some Democratic voters, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have tackled substantial problems and achieved many of their goals.

“I think by any reasonable measure, there have been more initiatives, more significant initiatives in this administration than any time since the Great Society,” he said. “The financial reform that I played a role in is the most important financial reform initiative since the Great Depression. Healthcare reform is the most important healthcare initiative since Medicaid and Medicare were created in the Great Society.”

Miller added that the most significant effects of healthcare reform haven’t yet been felt by most consumers and citizens.

“People on Medicare will see the donut hole close,” he said. “They should know that Medicare will be solvent for several more years. Parents are going to be able to keep adult children on their coverage until age 26. Small employers will get help to keep their employees covered. If you get a scary diagnosis from your doctor, you’re not going to have to fight with an insurance company to ensure that you get the care that you need. It will reassure people that they have what they think they have. You won’t have middle-class families going into bankruptcy when someone gets sick.”

As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, Miller would like to see financial reform go further.

“I introduced a bill in the House to reduce the largest banks to no more than 3 percent of GPD,” he said. “The six biggest banks make up 62 percent of the GPD now. I think banks need to be smaller and less complicated. Whatever inefficiencies there may be from banks doing several things are more than made up for by the conflicts of interest that they have in. The same banks that made the loans have created pools of loans and sold the toxic assets. They’ve made a mess of things, and they’ve acted to protect themselves and not homeowners or their shareholders.”

Miller said the conservative critique positing that the crisis was abetted by Democratic politicians aligned with the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s agenda of encouraging low-income people to buy homes they could not afford is misplaced.

“I’ve been pushing for a long time as a protection to consumers that no lender make a loan that the borrower could not pay back; that’s to protect consumers and stabilize the market,” he said. “Fannie and Freddie did wrong, but the wrongs they did were the same as the private banks. They were too eager to make money and too short sighted in how they went about it. The loans that really touched this off were not the loans to buy houses; they were mortgages that people already had, but they needed money and the only asset they had was their home. They had a personal bankruptcy or a healthcare crisis or a divorce and they refinanced their house to get some extra cash. More than 70 percent of subprime mortgages were to refinance houses.”

Foreign policy is less a focus of national attention currently considering difficult economic conditions at home, but is part of Miller’s purview as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Miller visited Afghanistan in May and said he was encouraged by reports of economic progress and stability. His confidence was shaken subsequently when he learned that the provincial governor he had met with had been assassinated in a car bomb. He added that he is disheartened by the track record of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, explaining that, “at the very least, he has family members that are enthusiastic participants in the corruption that appears to be rampant, and the Karzai government appears to have backdoor negotiations going on with the Taliban.”

“I’ve wanted to support President Obama and allow him a chance to deal with Afghanistan after seven years of the Bush administration,” Miller said, “but I’m certainly not willing to leave American forces in harm’s way.”