California Insider

A Weblog by
Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

Back to California Insider home page

« The more things change... | | More scare tactics against RPI »

May 30, 2003

A good one gets away

This news is a few days old, but still largely unreported in California: former Assemblyman Louis Caldera has been named president of the University of New Mexico. An El Paso native who was raised in Los Angeles County, Caldera is a West Point grad with an MBA and a law degree from Harvard. He left the Assembly in 1997 to take a job running Clinton’s national service operation and later became Secretary of the Army. He was always one of my favorite legislators because he was fiercely independent. He answered to his constituents and his conscience and, as far as I could tell, nothing else. He also had the guts to think of himself as a legislator who happened to be Latino, not a Latino lawmaker. While proud of his roots, he refused to see the world only through his ethnicity. I always thought he would have made a great governor or U.S. senator some day. At 47, he still might. But I’m increasingly doubtful that it’s going to be in California. This state desperately needs leaders with courage and vision. We can’t afford to let the few we have get away.