Lujan Grisham offers vision
Congresswoman pitches herself as leader who knows how government works
Michelle Lujan Grisham has an ear for detail. It was the late 1990s, and Lujan Grisham was director of the state’s agency on aging. She was sitting in a dentist’s chair one day when she overheard another patient telling a doctor about the struggle of finding supplemental health insurance for an ailing relative.
“Had it not been for her eavesdropping, I guess you’d say, I really would have been lost,” said the patient, Theresa Barela.
As Barela was leaving, Lujan Grisham — the dentist’s bib still around her neck — stopped Barela and handed over the number for someone in state government who could help.
If Lujan Grisham is elected governor this year, it will be in no small part because enough people in this state have stories like that one.
To be sure, the Democratic congresswoman from Albuquerque can pull off a headlinegrabbing stunt, like when she posed as a stroke patient and went undercover in a nursing home to investigate neglect. And then there was the time she gatecrashed a White House meeting on immigration. But when you get past all that, the former cabinet secretary is very much a wonk.
She can speak the language of health insurers and government agencies, with all the acronyms that involves.
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help” has become a clichéd knock at the liberal approach to public policy. But Lujan Grisham has said it — or something like it — more than a few times. The test of this election is whether
she can convince New Mexicans a state cabinet secretary-turned-member-of-Congress will be their solution, not their problem.
Critics have called her a creature of government. Some Democrats have called her a “Little Hillary,” drawing an unflattering comparison between her and the party’s 2016 presidential nominee. Lujan Grisham is too much of a politician, some argue, her platform too cautious and focus-grouped.
The congresswoman contends, however, that for the last eight years, the state’s leaders have been short on experience. Her argument to voters comes down to this: After two terms of a Republican administration that has clashed repeatedly with legislators, watched the state teeter financially and led the unemployment rate to one of the highest in the country, who else would you want as governor besides someone who knows how government really works?
“You have to understand government and you have to understand how hard it is,” she said. “I know a lot about what government does do, can do, should do.”
‘I’m tough’
Born in Los Alamos and raised in Santa Fe, Lujan Grisham’s father, Buddy, was a dentist. But she would follow some other prominent members of her family into politics. Her uncle, Manuel Lujan Jr., for example, was a Republican congressman and later, a Cabinet secretary.
A graduate of St. Michael’s High School, she went to the University of New Mexico, where she earned undergraduate and law degrees. As a lawyer, she developed a specialty focusing on issues involving the elderly. And in 1991, Gov. Bruce King named her director of the state’s agency on aging, overseeing services and care for the elderly.
A knack for constituent services won her support, or at least admiration, among both Republicans and Democrats.
Republican Gov. Gary Johnson kept her on and when Democrat Bill Richardson was elected to the office, he quickly learned “the seniors love her.”
In former legislator Jamie Koch’s new book, New Mexico Political History: 19692015, Richardson recounts that he was planning to fire all of Johnson’s appointees because he wanted his own team.
“My first meeting with Michelle was not good,” Richardson recounted. The governor told his advisor: “Jesus, I mean she works for Johnson.”
But sure enough, “all the seniors started going crazy because I hadn’t renamed her” as the agency’s director, Richardson added.
So, he kept her on board and tapped her to be secretary of health in 2004.
In that role, she pushed back against President George Bush’s “abstinence only” education policies.
But Lujan Grisham also came in for new scrutiny.
A federal investigation highlighted inadequate care that led to “needless suffering and untimely deaths” at Fort Bayard, a state facility that at the time cared for people with mental illness and intellectual disabilities.
Meanwhile, some at the Department of Health accused her of micromanaging — taking a “my way or the highway” approach.
Years later, Lujan Grisham does not exactly shy from that criticism.
“I’m tough,” she said in an interview last month. “You do a good job, I’m your best friend. You do a mediocre job and you need support or a chance to do something else, I will do whatever it takes to give you that job. If you do not want to do your job and you refuse to do it, I don’t care … it’s the wrong job for you and you’re leaving.”
Still, that would be Lujan Grisham’s last job in state government. She resigned and in 2008, ran for Congress.
Her first campaign fell flat, though. She lost the Democratic primary for a seat in Albuquerque to Martin Heinrich, who would go on to win the general election.
So she won a seat on the Bernalillo County Board of Commissioners in 2010 and started a firm, Delta Consulting, a health insurance consulting firm (a spokesman said had divested from the company and that the sole owner is now state Rep. Debbie Armstrong, Lujan Grisham’s campaign treasurer).
Then, in 2012, the widowed mother of two now-grown children made a run for the same congressional seat when Heinrich launched a campaign for Senate.
That time, she won.
In Congress
The U.S. House of Representatives may not seem like a place where a Democrat could get much done.
The Democrats have been in the minority since 2011 and the House’s work has been characterized by gridlock. Though she has pushed several successful bills, only one piece of legislation Lujan Grisham sponsored has been signed into law since taking office in 2013 (it involved a transfer of land).
But in late 2016, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus elected her chair. This in turn put her out front on the issue of immigration. And she ended up cosponsoring as well as serving as a leading booster for a bipartisan bill known as the USA Act to protect from deportation so-called Dreamers — immigrants brought to the country without documentation as children.
“Every day we’ve been in session, she has given a letter to the speaker or done something to get the attention of his staff,” said U.S. Rep. Pete Aguilar, a Democrat from California and whip of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, describing the so-far-futile push by lawmakers to get a vote on the bill.
Still, her time in Congress has not been without controversy.
An Albuquerque woman alleged she was fired from an internship in Lujan Grisham’s office because she is transgender. Lujan Grisham’s staff have said the claims are false.
And the Office of Congressional Ethics
investigated Lujan Grisham’s travels to Azerbaijan with several other House members in 2013. They were cleared of wrongdoing but the Washington Post reported Lujan Grisham had not disclosed that she was given a rug on the trip. The congresswoman told the Post in her defense that she did not think the rug was particularly valuable or attractive.
“It’s not a carpet I would have purchased,” she said, according to the Post. The Hill later reported that she turned over the rug to the House clerk.
On the issues
Lujan Grisham has laid out an agenda that is in many ways cautious or at the very least pragmatic, reflecting the consensus she thinks she can get rather than what a crowd at a campaign rally might want to hear.
The congresswoman, for example, is proposing raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour immediately and $12 an hour in four years, indexing it to inflation. Her opponents, state Sen. Joseph Cervantes and businessman Jeff Apodaca, are both calling for $15 an hour.
And she is proposing to draw $285.5 million from the land grant permanent fund over five years to pay for early childhood education. That is less money than the state House has approved in a plan that has long met opposition from budget hawks among Senate Democrats.
Call it cautious, but Lujan Grisham contends it is actually just savvy — a recognition of the realities of what it will take to get this much more funding into early childhood education.
It is much the same story with marijuana.
Lujan Grisham says she would be a champion for legalization “because you better get it right,” referring to the myriad legal issues that are bound to arise.
The same mechanics of governing weigh on the congresswoman’s plans for creating jobs.
Lujan Grisham is proposing to create “centers of excellence” at state universities that will leverage existing expertise and focus on bringing in researchers and students to focus on four sectors: cybersecurity, agriculture, renewable energy and bioscience. In turn, she says her administration would push to build those industries in the state.
But this brings Lujan Grisham back to what may be the biggest ask of her campaign. It is, in effect, a campaign that asks New Mexicans to believe their state government can really lead.
“I think government actually does create jobs,” Lujan Grisham said. “It either produces a vision and shows real investments towards that vision and removes barriers or it doesn’t.”