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. 
