Senate Titan Sets Exit, and Maneuvering Begins
2-Decade Reign To End in 2010

By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 16, 2006; B02


For much of the past three decades, Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. has been the state's most visible wheeler-dealer, money raiser, kingmaker, gavel smasher and irrepressible political force.

Now, after an unprecedented 20-year reign as Senate president, Miller, 63, says he has decided to make his coming four-year term his last.

"At that point in my life, I can step down and turn the gavel over to the next generation," Miller said in a telephone interview yesterday. "I intend to work with them, serve out the four-year term and step aside."

He was reelected Nov. 7 and will begin serving his 10th term in the General Assembly when it reconvenes Jan. 10.

His plans for retirement, though four years in the distance, had almost immediate reverberations in the state capital.

Within hours of his plans becoming known, senators had detected one of those rare political moments when ambition and opportunity intersect. Several began calling Miller for advice about moving up.

Miller tried to maintain calm, calling reporters to clarify that he plans to run his chamber for the next four years.

"I mean, please," he implored one reporter. "Take it easy on this."

But in the next breath, Miller began circulating the names of Democrats who probably will be vying to replace him: Sen. Thomas M. Middleton (Charles), Sen. Brian E. Frosh (Montgomery), Sen. Ulysses Currie (Prince George's).

Plenty of others will start making moves, Miller confided, as he tried to deftly deflate what could become an unseemly four-year campaign to replace him. "I'm just telling them to relax. We're going to give all of them the opportunity to shine," he said. "I'm not going to anoint anybody."

At the least, the four years of advance warning will enable senators to start to envision the chamber in someone else's control. Miller's retirement plans were first reported yesterday by the Washington Times.

"Because he's been there for 20 years, we're looking at a brave new world," Frosh said.

Miller's gift, Frosh said, has been his ability to be both disarmingly charming and piercingly blunt. He plainly told Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., for instance, that a Republican administration could expect a cooperative, collegial Senate for three years. It didn't need to be said what the fourth, an election year, would be like.

Miller once likened Parris N. Glendening to a baboon in a tree (the higher he climbs, the more of his rear you see, he'd say with a laugh). But once Glendening became governor -- and appointed Miller's son, Thomas, to the Maryland Parole Commission -- the two began to work seamlessly on rafts of legislation, including many bills Miller initially resisted.

Glendening yesterday called him an "absolutely extraordinary figure in Maryland history."

Despite the widely circulated bit of trivia that Miller is the nation's longest-serving Senate president, that's a distinction he isn't likely to realize. The presiding officer of the Tennessee Senate has served for 16 years longer than Miller, and Indiana's Senate president, who just left office, had him bested by seven.

That won't stop the testimonials, though. Already, the Senate's newly constructed office building carries Miller's name, so there's no telling what more could follow.

There will be plenty to look back on when the time comes to explore Miller's tenure. He has had incredible highs, as when he stood alongside President Bill Clinton under the State House dome for the signing of "smart gun" legislation that he helped make palatable to opponents.

There have also been low moments, though in most cases, Miller managed to emerge from beneath them -- as when the FBI looked into his fundraising maneuvers (and closed the case without finding wrongdoing), or when a fellow senator launched a coup attempt (that failed), or when a political foe had him charged for punching him in the face (but the charges were dropped).

"He knew how to make the system work," Glendening said.

And though not many major policy shifts have originated in Miller's office, every one of them had to pass across his desk.

"The progress the state has made over the last four decades has a lot to do with Mike Miller," Currie said. "When you think about it all, it's pretty phenomenal."

His assiduous attention to his Southern Maryland Senate district, and his heavy involvement in the drawing and redrawing of his district lines, has guaranteed him electoral safety. So his departure will come by choice.

That choice was cemented, Miller said yesterday, when Democrats swept this month's elections. His fundraising and advice helped him maintain a firm Senate majority, and after four years under Ehrlich's control, the state will return in January to its long tradition of Democratic governors.

"The Democrats are now positioned to be the party at the center of mainstream politics," Miller said. "Now that the party is the mainstream again, I feel very happy. Very happy."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company