The Unsexiest Legislator

There’s nothing sexy about Representative Henry Waxman. He doesn’t
have the charisma of Ted Kennedy, or the furious intellect of Newt
Gingrich, or the ideological energy of Nancy Pelosi. He has represented
Los Angeles in the U.S. House of Representatives for over 30 years
without much personal or professional drama to speak of. He’s not a
rabble-­rousing populist or an attention whore. That might be the
reason why he’s been such an effective legislator, most recently
coauthoring and successfully spearheading the Waxman-Markey climate
bill, which the New York Times declared was “the most ambitious
energy and climate-change legislation ever introduced in Congress.”

Waxman-Markey is a dramatic 180-degree turn for the federal
government, a repudiation of decades of Republican environmental
inattention. Its passage through the House of Representatives was a
singular moment in American legislative history, the kind of action
that haunts every legislator’s dreams. If the bill passes the Senate in
September, it can only be a climactic moment in Waxman’s long career.
And of course, due to the glacial schedules of the publishing industry,
there’s no mention of Waxman-Markey in The Waxman Report. Which
is a shame, because the book could use a jolt of excitement to bring it
to life.

Report doesn’t waste time with memoir—Waxman rockets
from birth (“I was born in 1939 in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of
Boyle Heights,” drones the first sentence) to the California State
Assembly in 12 short pages. Instead it focuses on his inspiration to
clean up government (when Waxman was a state representative,
then–California governor Ronald Reagan sent state workers, often
dressed as doctors, into poor neighborhoods to trick people into giving
up state insurance for HMOs) and his efforts to become an effective
legislator.

Report describes, in detail, the various battles that Waxman
has fought over the years in the House of Representatives. Waxman’s
arena has traditionally been public health—he was one of the
first and loudest voices for victims of AIDS in the early 1980s, for
instance, when Reagan wouldn’t even mention the disease in
public—and he has written some groundbreaking legislation in that
field. But Report is no And the Band Played On.

When written about in the proper way, legislation can be as exciting
and addictive as an action sequence in a good thriller. Robert Caro’s
mammoth biographies of Lyndon Johnson contain a few compelling passages
about the inner workings of the Senate that make for riveting reading.
Unfortunately, neither Waxman nor his cowriter, Joshua Green, can
muster that kind of energy. (At least Waxman, unlike so many of his
political-memoirist peers, honorably gives Green full credit for his
coauthorship: Green’s name appears on the cover of the book, in print
nearly as large as Waxman’s own.)

It could be worse: Waxman at least knows what he is not. His sole
attempt at humor in 226 pages, when he suggests that he dropped a bit
of legislation about maple syrup to avoid a “sticky situation,” is so
painful that it makes the reader grateful that he plays the rest of the
book straight. Sadly, there’s very little insight into Waxman’s
strategies. He writes an impassioned few sentences against compromise
(“Legislation crafted this way usually fails. ‘Meeting in the middle’
doesn’t work for the simple reason that it invariably neglects to solve
whatever problem raised the issue in the first place”) but otherwise
keeps his interior life to a bland good-versus-evil gloss.

The best chapters of the book, relating his attempts to rein in big
tobacco, hint at what the entire book could have been in the hands of
an artful ghostwriter. In a rare flash of emotion, Waxman, an
ex-smoker, manages to convey disgust at the power that lobbyists and
CEOs of tobacco companies had over Congress at the beginning of his
time in office, and he successfully paints himself as an underdog in a
high-stakes battle, as opposed to a canny legislator who knows how to
work the system. It’s a rare, refreshing bit of propulsive
storytelling, and it happens at just the right climactic moment.

There will no doubt one day be a valuable book about Waxman’s career
in Washington, D.C. As one of the few legislators who appears to treat
the House of Representatives as a noble profession and not just a
stepping stone to money or power, Waxman has been a servant to the
American people. It’s a disservice to him, to the important work of
public health, and to the legislative process that his book is so
goddamned dull.