Why Not the Best?
The 2008 presidential campaign has started already. Let's not be equally quick to declare a winner before considering. . . Bill Richardson?
Back in the days before presidential elections were decided at least in part on qualifications instead of soundbites and attack ads, Gov. Bill Richardson's quest for the White House would have seemed anything but quixotic. Though we've long teased the governor in these pages about his ambitions, both on paper and by dint of personality he ought to be a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2008. That he's not—at least not yet—says more about the twisted nature of politics in an age of celebrity than it does about Richardson.
While nomination contests before the advent of television occasionally produced "celebrity" candidates such as Wendell Wilkie, most nominees had to "pay their dues." Today, however, star power overwhelms experience. Neither favorite for the Democratic nomination comes close to Richardson's resume: Other than being First Lady, Sen. Hillary Clinton has only a single term in the Senate to her credit; Sen. Barack Obama is still in his first term. Former Sen. John Edwards, whom pundits see as the most credible challenger to those two, has one term in the Senate plus a vice-presidential campaign on his resume. The smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear, whatever their faults, would have deemed all three too green and unseasoned for a White House run.
By contrast, Richardson boasts a wealth of both legislative and executive experience: eight terms in Congress, two Cabinet posts, a term as governor that earned him re-election by a record margin. Unlike most White House-seeking governors (notably the one who is now president), he's met and negotiated with world leaders—including Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Jong Il—and knows the international stage as well as his own state. From a purely political perspective, Richardson has succeeded in a state that went "red" in 2004, in the pivotal Rocky Mountain region, and he represents the nation's fastest-growing ethnic group. Plus Richardson may be the best pure campaigner the Democrats have seen since Bill Clinton.
Not that his candidacy doesn't have potential downsides. Some see a frat-boy quality about Richardson that also reminds them squirmingly of the less-attractive side of Bill Clinton. Critics call him a bully. His administration has been rife with cronyism. His troubled stint as energy secretary could give opponents attack-ad ammo. Some of his stands smack of opportunism, such as his support of a flag-burning ban and pandering to the NRA; you can support hunters without, as Richardson did in Congress, opposing controls on assault weapons.
But Richardson is right on the issues most important to Democratic voters, including opposition to the war in Iraq. (That's in sharp contrast to supposed frontrunner Sen. Clinton, whose position has "evolved" in a convolution that makes John Kerry's garbled 2004 stance look Churchillian by comparison.) Here in New Mexico, he's taken strong stands to protect the environment and to boost the minimum wage. Yet a GOP opponent would be hard-pressed to define Bill Richardson as a wild-eyed liberal.
Richardson is not necessarily our first choice, and he's hardly the ideal 2008 candidate by the standards of People magazine, but Democrats dazzled by the Clinton and Obama mystique would be smart to give him a closer look. Just as those candidates could make history by becoming the first female or African-American president, Bill Richardson could become the first Hispanic in the White House. And he might actually know what to do once he got there.
On the Republican side and also from the Southwest, Arizona Sen. John McCain seems so obsessed with being the frontrunner—and avoiding the pitfalls of his 2000 campaign—that he's abandoned everything that made him an attractive "maverick" last time. Inexplicably, McCain has turned himself into McBush, running on the legacy of arguably the most failed presidency in US history. McCain's support for our Iraq misadventure borders on the manic: He's become the poster boy for the president's divorced-from-reality "surge" plan (which was, after all, McCain's idea—albeit with even larger, crazier troop numbers—before Bush adopted it).
Even the straight-shooter positions that made McCain look like the Real McCoy in the past have crumbled, on close inspection, before his overweening ambition. In the 2004 campaign, McCain condemned the scurrilous "Swift Boat" attacks on John Kerry; now McCain's campaign has hired the firm responsible for those ads. In the 2006 elections, a top McCain adviser decried the race-baiting ads used against Tennessee senate candidate Harold Ford Jr.; that ad firm, too, now works for McCain. The Arizona senator who took on the religious right in 2000—reminiscent of another Arizonan, Barry Goldwater—calling Jerry Falwell "an agent of intolerance," gave the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University last spring.
No, in 2008 Republicans longing for a straight-talking, decorated Vietnam veteran who's not afraid to take on the powers that be in his own party will have to look a bit farther north and east than Arizona. Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel has been warning the GOP and the country about the Iraq war since the beginning, and has been especially blunt in his criticism of the "surge" proposed by his own party's president, calling it "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." Hagel also had sharp words for his fellow senators wary of taking a stand on the war: "If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes."
It's not just Iraq. Hagel's refusal to support the so-called "Marriage Protection Amendment" led the religious right to take out full-page newspaper ads attacking him.
Voters who agree with Chuck Hagel on Iraq or gay marriage might disagree with him on a host of other issues. But at least Americans would know he's a candidate speaking from his heart—and his gut—instead of mouthing platitudes crafted by consultants or pandering to every right-wing interest group.
Sen. Hagel has not, as of this writing, definitely decided to enter the 2008 presidential race. But it would be a refreshing jolt to the campaign if he does.
The decision about America's next president is too important to leave to the consultants and media mythmakers, the bloggers and political paparazzi. A campaign between, say, Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. Chuck Hagel might not be glamorous—and certainly would not satisfy purists of either the left or the right—but it might just be good for the country.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert
Exposure and is one of a
handful of
Americans not running for president in 2008.