Dan

Calabrese

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December 13, 2007

Why No Democratic Love for Bill Richardson?

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have served 18 years – combined – in the United States Senate. Before that, Edwards sued large corporations, Obama served in the Illinois legislature and Hillary botched health care reform while searching for her law firm billing records.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Democratic Party top-tier candidates. It must make Bill Richardson crazy.

If any Democratic presidential candidate is ready to govern, it is Richardson. His candidacy hardly gets a mention in campaign coverage, and he barely registers in the polls. But if experience matters – and it does if you care about a president’s ability to govern – Richardson is far and away the most well-rounded and qualified candidate the Democrats have to offer.

New Mexico’s governor since 2002, Richardson has cut taxes, presided over low unemployment and the creation of 80,000 jobs. As Secretary of Energy during the Clinton Administration, Richardson ran a cabinet level department. Before that, he gained experience on the diplomatic front as ambassador to the United Nations.

Richardson served for 10 years in the U.S. House prior to joining the Clinton Administration, which means he has more experience in Congress than any of his three top rivals for the nomination.

Let’s be clear: I wouldn’t vote for Richardson. He says he would pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq at the earliest opportunity. He is all too willing to subject America to the ridiculous requirements of the Kyoto Protocol, which empowers UN bureaucrats to run roughshod over the U.S. economy so as to fight “climate change.”

And in 2003, Richardson actually presumed to negotiate an arms control deal with North Korea, then complained bitterly when the Bush Administration rightly laughed the deal off. To this day, Richardson claims that he and the North Koreans were doing the Lord’s work but were stymied by “lack of diplomatic willingness on the part of the Bush Administration.”

Plus, he’s endorsed by one of the biggest flim-flam artists in American history – Lee Iacocca. No thank you. Bill would not be my kind of president.

But the Democrats are not about the business of nominating a candidate to appeal to the likes of me. If you think America needs to go back to the United Nations, enact policies to combat “climate change,” stop wiretapping terrorists and pay for local police and fire with federal money, it seems to me you would want to put up a candidate who supports these goals and can make a strong claim that he’s ready to do the job of president.

Richardson knows the ropes, knows the issues and would know what to do from the first day on the job. His depth of knowledge would make him formidable in a debate against any Republican opponent. He is also the only governor running for the Democratic nomination, and recent history has shown that governors have been quite successful at winning the presidency (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush . . . no trend can remain perfect when Michael Dukakis gets involved), while U.S. senators have been remarkably unsuccessful (McGovern, Dole, Kerry).

So why don’t Democratic primary voters, at least if the polls can be believed, take Richardson seriously? Maybe this is why:

Richardson is the kind of candidate conservatives would mention if asked, if you had to live with a Democratic president, who would you prefer it to be? The right way to answer that question is not to try to choose the least liberal. Any Democratic president is going to be a liberal president. If you had to live with a Democratic president, you’d want someone who is at least a grown up. Someone who understands how to make decisions. Someone who understands how the federal government works. Someone who has had to run something – like a state – where he was judged by his ability to preside over a growing, job-creating economy.

Someone like Bill Richardson. He would certainly not be a good president in the context of a conservative’s vision for the country, but he could be trusted to make responsible day-to-day decisions, and his North Korea follies notwithstanding, would probably not display the combination of inexperience and impetuousness that could put America’s national security at risk.

The Democratic base isn’t interested in any of this. They want someone they think has “star power,” not experience and readiness. By gravitating toward Clinton, Obama and Edwards instead of far more experienced and qualified alternatives like Richardson, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd, Democratic voters are betting that a candidate’s face and personality might make people forget what the Democratic Party actually stands for.

Richardson has a long, distinguished, liberal record, and he would govern as a grown-up, responsible (and of course, wrong) liberal. The Democratic base doesn’t want to be grown up or responsible, but far be it from me to question the Democrats in their choice of a nominee. They’ve got such a good track record, after all.

There’s always New Mexico, governor.

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