Leading by Example: How We Can Inspire an Energy
and Security Revolution
By Bill Richardson
(Wiley, 256 pages, $25.95)
Every ambitious politician believes that if he can only get a
voter’s complete attention, he can eventually win you over.
Surely, the politician thinks, the brilliance of my
agenda will become apparent if only I can make this numbskull
listen.
Bill Richardson is a lot like that, only worse. He’s the
Democratic equivalent of an attention-starved puppy. He keeps
jumping up at you, slobbering earnestness all over the place,
making you want to say, “Down, boy!”.
Lest you think I exaggerate, a story: Back in 2005 I interviewed
Richardson while he was stumping for Tim Kaine’s Virginia
gubernatorial bid. After I asked him a question, Richardson stepped
in so close to me to answer that our noses almost touched. He
talked at length, right in my face, oblivious the sheer awkwardness
of his close-talking.
I wanted to say something but he was providing me with
plenty of quotes for my story, so I took notes and tried to imagine
that I was somewhere else — like a foot or so back.
For those of you who won’t have the opportunity to go
nose-to-nose with Richardson, he has published a campaign book,
Leading by Example: How We Can Inspire an Energy and Security
Revolution.
RICHARDSON’S OUGHT TO BE the exception to the general rule that
campaign books must be awful. He is arguably the most qualified
Democrat running to be president. He’s been a congressman,
governor, cabinet secretary, freelance diplomat, and ambassador to
the U.N. Surely he has an interesting story to tell or some genuine
insight into politics.
Apparently not. The book is staggeringly dull, enlivened only
the author’s rambling digressions. He’s got a storehouse of
Governor Schwarzenegger anecdotes and, by golly, he’s going to tell
every one of them.
In fact, the book is so bad that I’d be willing to bet that
Richardson wrote it himself (or, more likely, dictated it). I’d be
amazed to learn he actually hired a ghostwriter for this. Chapter
two begins, “Ten years make a decade.”
Slogging through this book is only for the most masochistic of
political junkies. It’s an updated Earth in the Balance,
but without Al Gore’s New Age philosophizing and Nazi analogies.
Instead it features a relentlessly upbeat We-Can-Do-It!
message.
After warning us that “the world’s climate is starting to change
around us … The results could be Earth-changing,” Richardson
reassures us that “I am not only confident in our nation’s ability
to address this energy challenge, I am also fully optimistic about
it.”
His enthusiasm is the best explanation for the book’s clumsy
writing. He was so excited to talk about energy policy he
apparently had no time to re-read his own manuscript. If he did he
might have deleted passages like this one: “I had no idea I would
end up running the Department of Energy during perhaps the most
volatile, up-and-down period for oil prices in world history.”
Throughout the book he steps on his own message in bewildering
ways. In one chapter he discusses his commitment to the little
people by touting his efforts on behalf of the Navajo Nation. At
their request, he got Highway 666 renamed the less-Satanic Highway
491.
Then he recounts how he opposed as governor the building of a
major coal-generating plant on a reservation that would have
provided the Navajos with much-needed jobs. Even after the okay
from labor unions and the EPA, he put the kibosh to the project. It
would hurt the state’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, so he
said no — tribal sovereignty be damned.
So he’s for token measures like changing signs. Actual jobs for
the Navajos? Let’s not get carried away.
IN THE TRUE SPIRIT of every candidate seeking office, Richardson
blames every problem on the guy whose job he wants: “I particularly
fault the president and Congress for their failure to act
responsibly in recent years.”
Others are absolved: “The American people don’t need or deserve
a scolding.” Really? Doesn’t the fact that American voters elected
those leaders mean that we share some responsibility?
Richardson is a firm believer in new technology to provide
solutions. “No one’s geeks are smarter than ours,” he says.
Not smart enough, apparently, because, he argues that Americans
will still need “to make some sacrifices to break our dependence on
oil.” The book pushes for mandating higher energy efficiency,
expansion of alternative sources, and regulations and taxes against
polluting too much.
He grants the occasional exception to this rule, though: “I
personally like a sport utility vehicle. I’m a big guy and I don’t
fit really well in smaller cars. I usually travel with security
agents and staff. For a while we used the largest hybrid we could
find, an Escape that Ford executives bent over backward to get for
me in a tight market a few years ago.”
Unfortunately, that vehicle “turned out to be too small for me,
my state security staff, and for one or two of my people, so now we
use larger SUVs that can hold more people.”
To lighten the mood he tells amusing anecdotes about his career
in politics. There was the time he was invited to take a test drive
of a new $3 million prototype Toyota hydrogen fuel vehicle. With
the media invited to watch, Richardson accidentally went the wrong
way down a one-way street.
“There’s a metaphor in there,” Richardson says. “It would be all
too easy for our political leaders to take us in the wrong
direction.” Noted.
I SHOULDN’T BE too hard on Richardson. He is genuinely concerned
about energy issues and occasionally willing to break with liberal
orthodoxy. He touts nuclear power, because it doesn’t add to carbon
pollution.
But other times one wonders how hard he has thought about
policy. Discussing the 2000 energy crisis in western states, he
says, “I was surprised by the economists’ general view that the
market should be allowed to perform and correct itself.”
The book concludes with the chapter “2020 Vision.” Richardson
pictures a world magically transformed by his policies. Energy
efficiency soars while energy prices fall. Carbon levels in the
atmosphere drop while alternative energy investments actually pay
for themselves. Oil dependence becomes a thing of the past. America
is loved and admired again as other countries follow in our
greentastic path.
In his utopia, “You feel better about yourself. Your church is
full of talk of stewardship enacted, not stewardship
envisioned.”
Even better, “You feel like a moral person — someone who cares
about our planet and helps protect it.”
As I write this, Richardson is in the low single digits in polls
both nationally and in the key primary states. It’s tempting to
dismiss Leading by Example as a pipe dream.
Then again, Richardson is often touted as a vice presidential
pick. He may yet get the opportunity to get in our faces about his
vision for many years to come.
