Richardson's Rise and Stall

http://newmexicoindependent.com/14537/on-bill-richardsons-rise-and-stall
Richardson left the Clinton Administration to earn money. He worked for Kissinger Associates (Henry’s for-profit outfit) and sat on the boards of three oil companies. Also, he was an outside director at Peregrine Systems, a software company that went bankrupt, after which its CEO (a relative of Mrs. Richardson) was charged with securities fraud. Richardson said he was out of the loop.

As Governor, he skirted several scandals involving New Mexico public officials, evaded questions about campaign donations from executives of companies doing business with the state and played nicely with un-appetizing elements of the state Democratic Party.

Despite that and despite a reputation dating back to his congressional days for bullying and arrogance, he got projects off the ground. Still, each achievement seemed calculated to craft an image to exploit in future races –- Richardson, the pro-business liberal.

Thus, the Governor kicked off his reign by cutting income tax rates on the highest brackets. (Cue business applause.) He subsidized trains, movies and space business; environmentalists and intellectuals joined the business boosters and only libertarians grumbled.

He cajoled chambers of commerce into swallowing a modest hike in the minimum wage; thumbs up from business and labor. And while pushing incremental improvements in health coverage, Richardson stonewalled measures the insurance business feared; reformers were disappointed but he’d pleased an industry noted for helping its friends.

This was government tailored neatly to personal ambition.

What to make of him? Here’s a politician so nimble he dances, Astaire-like, right and left, then taps to center stage for his bow — but who never notices (or averts his eyes from) tawdry doings backstage.

I see Bill Richardson as a man of his times.

“Virtue never has been as respectable as money,” Mark Twain once pointed out, but surely the last 25 years have seen the apotheosis of market morality –- i.e., no morality. Oozing into every nook and cranny of American life, it dissolves ethics and justice wherever it seeps.

Permission to digress? Writing about our degraded public life reminds me of former Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, who died last week. In person, he was unassuming and soft-spoken. He thought himself a public servant. In this age of unapologetic materialism, he was quaint, a relic.

A man of our era, Bill Richardson blatantly used public office as a means to an end — his political ascent. I hope he powers out of the stall, but not before rebalancing his priorities, putting New Mexicans’ interests before his.