Interesting Stuff

Today I got to hear New Mexico governor Bill Richardson speak about his aspirations to be president. He has lead quite a distinguished life of public service: he has also been the ambassador to the United Nations, and the US Secretary of Energy, as well as serving in the House of Representatives. With the possible exception of John Dean, Richardson has impressed me more than any other political candidate I’ve heard of. From what he said, he has a history of getting things done: his education policy brought New Mexico’s schools from 47th in the nation to 27th. As UN ambassador, he managed to extricate journalists held hostage in the Sudan. He recently took a trip to North Korea, and managed to recover the bodies of several soldiers who died in the Korean War. He doesn’t seem to like playing politics, and would much rather just get stuff accomplished. This impressed me, because most politicians I read about don’t actually seem interested in solving the country’s problems; they’re usually more interested in giving the appearance of having solutions, so that they can get reelected and buy themselves more time to campaign.

He seemed to have three large points, and then a whole bunch of small ones. His first point was that we should withdraw from Iraq, and he put forth the most plausible scenario for it I’ve ever heard. He negotiated with Saddam Hussein as an ambassador, so he has a pretty good handle on the situation. He thinks we should divide Iraq up into three states, one each for the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds, with equal shares in governmental power and oil resources. He thinks our troops are one of the main targets in the country right now, so he would have a complete withdrawal of American troops from the country (but not from the region: they would stay in our airbases in Afghanistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, &c). He would simultaneously work with these other countries to help keep the peace in our stead: a stable Iraq is in the best interests of its neighbors, and he would like to get multilateral support from them to keep the government stable. He thinks the peacekeeping force should only have Muslims in it, so that each soldier can relate to the people around him or her.

His second big point was education. He admits that our education system has fallen woefully behind that of India, China, and a number of other countries. His education policies in New Mexico (namely instituting all-day kindergarten and rebudgeting for more teachers and less bureaucracy) have tremendously raised New Mexico’s education system, and he wants to do similar things in the rest of the country. He wants to offer voluntary preschool to all kids starting at age 4. He wants more of the education budget to go to teachers and less to go to side projects, and bureaucracy. He wants to create over 200 academies of math and science at which to train the most promising students for careers that will help shape the future of the country. He wants to ban “junk food” in schools, require physical education, and generally promote a more healthy lifestyle. He has already done this in New Mexico, and he says it’s working out really well.

His third point was about global warming. He thinks that not only is it a threat to the world, but it has the potential to create lots of new industries and jobs. He wants to create tax incentives for people who install solar panels on their roofs. He wants to mandate that all cars get at least 40 MPG within five years, and at least 50 MPG within ten. He wants to invest in renewable energy sources, because he doesn’t think we have much of a future being dependent on oil, foreign or domestic. He said we need an “Apollo-like” statement about our environmental and energy policies, which I thought was a wonderful, if bold, thing to say.

He calls himself a “pro-growth Democrat,” which seems to mean that he is a fiscal conservative interested in using tax incentives to promote innovation and infrastructure improvements. Not only does he want to improve our education, environmental, and energy policies, he wants to do it without increasing government spending. He wants a constitutional amendment to balance the budget each year (with exceptions for wartime and major recession), which is a policy he apparently used in New Mexico with good results. He is a big proponent of pay-as-you-go programs, which he worked with as Secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration. He (rightly) thinks that our defense budget is way to big, and wants to cut many of the pet projects from it (he thinks it’s ridiculous that we spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and in particular that we spend it developing new nuclear weapons). He has vowed to veto any bill that crosses his desk which contains what he considers pork or pet project funding. He is unusual in this respect, and he attributes it to his not being a current member of Congress (and therefore not having lobbyists or pet projects of his own to fund).

He thinks the three biggest threats to the future are global warming, the deficit, and Social Security and Medicare. I’ve discussed his plans for the first two, but I don’t really understand his plans for the last one. He thinks we should decrease the age at which you are eligible for Medicare from 65 to 55, because many senior citizens who need Medicare help aren’t getting it right now. I’m not really sure how he plans to fund this in the future, but he talked about a plan to get universal health care for everyone, similar to the policies that have worked so well in Canada and Europe, and that this program should include the homeless and illegal immigrants (more on this later). Richardson says that at the moment, 31% of our healthcare budget goes to administrative costs and bureaucracy. Of the rest, a third goes to treating diabetes and obesity. He wants to cut the administrative costs and instead promote healthy lifestyles (just like in his education policy), so that the costs for diabetes and obesity go down. To get this system to work for everyone, he doesn’t want to force you to change your current healthcare plan if you don’t want, but he wants to get everyone to help pay for the new system: companies, individuals, and the government should all work together for this new healthcare plan. To be honest, I don’t see the incentive for any companies, government, or wealthy individuals to go along with this, but it would be great to see universal healthcare, if he can get it to work here. Even more interestingly, he wants veterans to be given free medical care at any hospital, not just the underfunded Veterans Hospitals that have second-rate treatments.

He wants to secure our borders, but in a smart way: he doesn’t want to build ineffective walls, but instead increase the number of border patrollers on duty. On top of this, he wants to increase the number of HB1 visas to let more people into the country legally, and he wants to create a program to legalize the aliens who are already here. Moreover, he wants to work with the Mexican government on this problem: if Mexico can get help creating an environment in which fewer people want to leave, the immigration problem will be lessened. He has already worked with the Chihuahuan government towards these goals (they’re a region of Mexico that shares a border with his state).

He is a big proponent of using diplomacy as the first tool to solve any international problem, but that it should be used to solve the problem instead of treating the symptoms. In particular, he thinks that the way to deal with North Korea is to arrange a deal similar to the following: get North Korea to disarm its nuclear weapons, its nuclear facilities, and allow in UN inspectors to verify that the nuclear program is completely disarmed. In return, the other countries in the traditional 6-party talks (the US, Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea) will promise not to attack North Korea, and instead create programs to give food, medicine, and other humanitarian aid to the country. Richardson says this plan has been floated by several strategists from several countries over the years, and that it would be a great way to solve our North Korean problems once and for all. In other parts of the world, he wants to increase our aid budget, but with a focus on education and renewable energy. He thinks that the problem with the World Bank is that the programs it creates to “help” third world countries land them in tremendous debt. Instead, we should be helping them in such a way that their futures aren’t completely ruined. He talked about bringing computing power and broadband internet access to much of Africa, which impressed me, because he apparently hasn’t heard of the One Laptop Per Child project, which tries to do something quite similar, and of which Google is a large sponsor.

The thing that impressed me most about Governor Richardson was how genuine he seemed. He cracked jokes (his commercials are quite funny) and had a back-and-forth with the audience. He seems to honestly want what is best for the country, and he appears to have practical plans that can actually work to bring us out of the sorry state the country is in right now. He listened carefully to people’s questions, and paused for thought before he answered. One such answer impressed me immensely: he was asked for his opinion on the Farm Act of 2002, and he paused for about 5 seconds. He then admitted that he wasn’t familiar with the act well enough to have a firm opinion on it. Instead, he got his aide to take down the email address of the person who asked the question, and promised to look into the issue and write an answer soon. This is in sharp contrast to the shenanigans John McCain pulled recently when he met a question he didn’t know about.

I don’t know enough about all the presidential candidates to endorse one yet, but I’m really impressed with Bill Richardson. He thinks he doesn’t have the money or “rockstar status” to compete in advertising with Senators Obama or Clinton, and instead is relying on something of a grassroots movement to get his message out. If you’re as interested in him as I am, it would be great if you wrote a letter to your favourite newspaper talking about him.