Presidential Project

Cori Hume
Amelia Vance

Candidate Profile

Candidate: Bill Richardson

Political Party: Democrat

What other political offices has this person had in his career?
Bill Richardson had been a Congressman for fourteen years, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Secretary of Department of Energy, and on his second term of being the Governor of New Mexico.

What prior political and leadership experiences does this candidate have that makes him qualified to be the next president?
While Bill Richardson was in Congress, he sat on the Interior Committee and the House Select Committee of Intelligence. While he was on the Interior Committee he fought for Native Americans to protect their land and improve the quality of their lives. He has met with Saddam to convince him that the two American contractors who got lost and accidentally crossed the Iraq border should be freed back to America. While being the United States Ambassador to the United Nations he helped Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) transition to democracy, he released hostages in Sudan, and negotiated a fragile cease-fire in Darfur.

He has been nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize, mainly for his attempt to create international peace. Being the Secretary of Department of Energy, he has been fighting global warming for years already. By 2010, he demanded that 7.5% of U.S. energy was renewable energy. He also got the government to begin to pay for medical expenses for nuclear workers who were sick and dying.

While he has been Governor of New Mexico, he has created 80,000 more jobs, the unemployment has been higher than it has in the past 30 years, and the income and teachers pay has also increased. He made a law where every child under the age of five receives health insurance. He used taxes for jobs and renewable energy, raised the minimum wage, and made a law that state utilities need to use four times the renewable energy then they were before.

Issues:
A) The Iraq War: Bill Richardson favors an elongated exist strategy for getting the US soldiers out of Iraq. However, he assures that he would have a deadline set some time in this calendar year that would be determined by the military officials. His rationale is that if any troops are left in Iraq, no matter what the purpose is, they will remain targets as well as provide the opportunity for continued violence. At the same time, he would have a peace convention held with the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurds, as well as a Persian Gulf Middle East peace conference. However, he also believes that some troops should be deployed to Afghanistan and some in other locations in the Middle East, because, in his opinion, “the terrorism is gaining strength.”
B) National Security: Bill Richardson’s views on national security cover a wide range of issues. He believes that human rights can be more important than national security, and he supports the Geneva Conventions. He feels that ignoring the Nuclear Test Ban will create distrust, but that there should still be a focus on international terrorism and materials that can be used for nuclear weapons. Richardson also regards America’s dependency on foreign oil as a liability to the country’s national security. He states that America needs to reduce that dependency from 65% to 20% by 2015.
C) Education: Bill Richardson has great goals for American education. His plan includes $60 billion towards making American education the best in the world, new math and science academies with 100,000 new teachers, a minimum wage for teachers of $40,000 per year, expanding the lottery scholarship program for college students, and supply every 7th grader with a laptop. The education of future Americans is so important to him that he believes that children should start in preschool under the age of 4 and that the both school days and the school year should be extended. He sees charter schools as holding a lot of promise, but if a school is failing, he believes that they should be helped to stop them from collapsing.
D) Healthcare: First and foremost, Bill Richards sees a need for a universal healthcare system, within one year. His goals are to form preventative healthcare without raising taxes, to find cures for HIV/AIDS, make sure that proscription drugs are lower for seniors, raise rates of child immunizations, and overall make healthcare affordable and accessible to everyone.
E) The Economy: On the issue of the economy, Bill Richardson believes that the next president must cut back enormously on spending, especially through elimination of corporate welfare, and to restore our financial strength by decreasing our budget surpluses He also believes that for the economy to be more successful, we must invest in three major areas: the future rather than spending everything now in the present, science and technology and an educated workforce. With science and technology, he wants to create 250 Math, Science, and Innovation Academies.
He also believes in order to maintain a healthy economy we need a highly skilled and well-paid workforce. He wants to keep promises to the Middle Class workers and work towards the future, rather than living day-by-day.
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F) Taxes: Bill Richardson does not just say he will make tax cuts. He has a history in New Mexico for doing it. His tax cuts would focus on the middle class and says he would reduce income tax as well as create a Taxpayer Bill of Rights. He wants to cut capital gains tax and income tax from 8.2%- 4.9%. He believes the tax structure for the wealthiest 2% is unfair and wants t end it. While being Governor of New Mexico, he returned $1 billion dollars from taxes back to families.

G) Global Warming: Bill Richardson has already had several years of experience in trying to prevent the effects of global warming. He has been the Secretary of Department of Energy. He wants to cut oil demand by 50% by 2020, by reducing oil imports. He wants to put the 100 mpg car into the market place, but must force work to get to 50 mpg by 2020. He also wants to reduce carbon impact from liquid fuels by 30% by 2020. He wants to improve the energy productivity 20% by 2020, He wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 90% by 2050. He wants oil companies to become energy companies, and he strongly encourages people to begin driving electric and plug-in cars and the use of transportation. He promotes solar wind, and biomass energy.
H) Nuclear Weapons: He wants to make significant cuts to our nuclear forces, which will encourage other nations to fight against nuclear productivity. He wants to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, and secure nuclear weapons from theft. He wants to free humanity from the threat of nuclear destruction and create a renewed U.S. commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. He believes these are the steps necessary to establish global nuclear weapon safety:
1. Halt nuclear weapons proliferation
2. Halt nuclear weapons production and reduce the size of nuclear arsenals
3. Halt or secure civilian programs that require or produce bomb-grade materials
4. Consolidate and secure all existing fissile materials and all future production associated with nuclear energy and research worldwide

Summary of biography:
Bill Richardson was born on November 15th 1947, having William Richardson as his father, and Maria Luisa Lopez-Collada as his mother. He was originally born in Pasadena, but soon moved to New Mexico due to his father’s job as a banker. He grew up immersed in both American and Mexican culture, celebrating and being proud of both. In 1961, he left his family and moved to Massachusetts for high school where he was on the Varsity Baseball Team and met his future wife, Barbara Flavin. In 1966, he continued his education at Tufts University in Boston. The turning point in his life where he became interested in politics was during a school trip to Washington DC and was inspired by the words of Senator Hubert Humphrey. While growing up, he soon learned that he needed to give back to his community.

He lived with his wife in D.C. for a few years, learning more about politics, and then moved back to New Mexico. He became a staffer for a local Democratic Party, and began to teach Government at Santa Fe Community College. Bill Richardson first campaigned in 1980 against Manual Lujan for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District. As he lost the first time, he won two years later.
While he was Congressman Richardson, he was on the Energy and Commerce Committee, in which he proposed an amendment to the Clean Air Act in order to have cleaner gas to fight pollution and global warming. He also fought to protect 1,000 acres of New Mexico wilderness and contributed to the Oil Pollution Prevention Act.

He also continued to fight for the rights of Native Americans, and from 1993-1994 he introduced 56 bills, 17 of which became laws. Richardson became more involved in diplomacy and traveled to North Korea and the Middle East. He became the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. While being Ambassador he took multiple trips to Africa which changed his life when he saw the diseases, poverty, and suffering first hand. It made him want to help the conflicts going on in Africa, such as cease-fire in Darfur, and he ended up with five nominees for the Nobel Peace Price.

In 1998, Richardson stopped being the Ambassador, and became the Secretary of Department of Energy, where he started to fight global warming and tried to stop the productivity of nuclear weapons as much as he could. He then decided to give back to the community he grew up in, New Mexico, and ran for governor. He won, and has won again being in his second term now of New Mexico’s Governor. He has helped the people of New Mexico significantly with jobs, health care, minimum wage, schools, and taxes.

Bill Richardson grew up inspired to make a change, and now he has given back to the community by being an inspirational leader for others.

My Point of View
To begin with, I am undecided on my political views. Some of the Liberal concepts make sense to me, but so do some of the Conservative ideas. I am not passionately connected to any of the 2008 presidential candidates. That being said, some of Bill Richardson’s views do make sense to me. For instance, the importance that he places on education, his reasons for viewing it so highly and his investment in the future all seem like helpful points to pursue. On the other hand, as much as getting all the troops out of Iraq seems like a good idea, especially since the current plan is not doing so well, I am not at all convinced that Bill Richardson’s “exist strategy” will work. I think that the Republicans do have a legitimate concern about making sure that there remains some stability in Iraq if we are going to pull all of our troops out.
If Bill Richardson was still running for president, it is possible that I would vote for him. However, I most likely would not, because I think my views tend to lean more towards the Conservative side. Most Democrats seem to me to have high expectations for how they will “fix” the problems and make life better for everyone, but they do not root their theories in reality. Richardson, on the other hand, does for the most part present realistic plans.