And what if Ken Salazar had become president?

New book says he would have made climate change a major plank. But what exactly did he have in mind? I tried, with marginal success, to get an answer.

by Allen Best

The world is full of nagging, unanswered what-ifs. For example, what if Joe Biden had been quicker to step aside in the 2024 presidential election? When finally he did so, he shooed Kamala Harris into the Democratic nomination. No time was given for even a brief intramural scramble among other potential candidates.

Ken Salazar was among those potential candidates. Salazar at the time was the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, but before that he had been Interior Secretary in the Obama administration, a U.S. senator and, beginning in 1999, Colorado attorney general.

In short, Salazar had racked up a string of successes in his public life in the last three decades. Not bad for a kid from the San Luis Valley, reared in a house without electricity and assigned the task of looking after sheep and cattle. He was not born into a world of privilege.

But if Salazar had been able to secure the Democratic nomination in 2024, how different might our national conversation be today?

In his book, “Borderlands: My Fight for an Inclusive America,” Salazar makes the case that improved border security need not be coupled with the white nationalism that has been President Donald Trump’s not-so-subtle wedge issue. “We can believe in a secure border and still treat each other as neighbors,” he said in a Facebook post this week.

Salazar believed a different conversation was possible, one driven not by the language of differences, including races and religions, but rather of heightened understanding of commonalities and acceptance of unimportant differences. More broadly, he describes a future of cross-border unity, of a North America with greater shared purpose.

Part of this in his envisioned campaign would have been a resolve to confront climate change. “If the United State could take the lead on blunting and eventually reversing the ravages of climate change, then we wouldn’t just make the United States and Mexico safer — we would make all people everywhere safer,” he wrote.

Since its August release, amid all else that he does, Salazar has been on a fast-paced book tour. He was in Mexico City and in Washington D.C., too, where he spoke at a Hispanic Heritage Month event, plus the Texas cities of Abilene and Fort Worth. He has also spoken across Colorado: Alamosa at least twice, plus Aspen, Greeley, Colorado Springs, and many other places.

This past week he was booked twice a day, including a day session with Xcel Energy folks on Tuesday during the day and then an evening session in Arvada.

The Arvada session drew 40 to 50 people, including a couple who said they were relatives. One of those in attendance, sitting behind me, was a man wearing a Stetson hat who said that he and Salazar shared ancestors two generations prior. Unlike Salazar, though, his parents had moved him while he was still a child for the greater prosperity of metro Denver. Even now, Colorado at times can be like one big small town.

My companion, who can reel off song lyrics like nobody I have ever known, shared with him a lyric from “Mule Skinner Blues,” a Jimmie Rogers yodeling song first recorded in 1930. “I’m going to town, honey, what do you want me to bring you back? / Bring a pint o’ booze, and a John B. Stetson hat!”

Salazar’s second-cousin laughed.

As for Salazar himself, he was wearing what I am guessing was a Stetson hat as well as Western boots and a broad, turquoise bolo tie. I have seen him several times in recent years, but never his bare head.

As for his speaking style, it is the opposite of the inverted-pyramid lead Associated Press writing. He takes his time in telling stories. He tends toward short sentences, introducing dialogue of past conversations in a he-said, she-said approach. He also stitches together some history that is relevant to today’s discussions.

For example, he told the story about Colorado’s governor a century ago, William “Billy” Adams, a product of the San Luis Valley and the namesake for Adams State College in

Alamosa. In Salazar’s telling, Adams was elected governor in 1926 in a rebuke of the Ku Klux Klan that then held a grip on the politics of Denver and more broadly Colorado.

That included Arvada, by the way, although a historical marker that tells the history of KKK marches in what is now Olde Town Arvada has been removed.

In Denver, vestiges of its Ku Klux Klan era lingered in a different form until recently. The airport that preceded DIA had been named after Benjamin Stapleton, the mayor elected with Klan support and who was, in fact, a KKK member himself when he declared his candidacy. The name lingered on in a public place until 2020, when residents of the neighborhood created on the site of the former airport renamed it Central Park.

Salazar used the word “courage” 11 times during his 90 minutes on stage. By this he meant elected officials need to take positions even when they are not politically expedient. Even a couple decades ago, legislative leaders in the Senate were able to agree on bipartisan immigration reform.

That courage has dissipated. During the Biden presidency, Salazar noted, a bipartisan coalition had created additional legislation to address the border issue. It would have passed — except that Trump told Republicans that it must be defeated. Sen. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, had helped negotiate the bill and was reported to be furious initially when Trump issued his edict. But bowing to political pressure, Lankford voted against the bill he had helped draft. The bill died.

As for climate change, I posed the first question in the Q&A at the Arvada session. In his book, Salazar had said climate change would have been his second major plank. He devoted only two sentences in the book to this major plank. I wanted more.

What more did he have in mind had he secured the Democratic nomination in 2024? And, without a Democratic majority in Congress, what could have been achieved? And finally, what can be said about the best step forward today?

As is true with much of his book, Salazar responded at a high level, avoiding details.

“What I would have said and what I’ll say today, and what I said last night in Boulder with (former senator) Mark Udall — I said it’s an existential issue for our planet. We can’t run away from them. We have to be out there with solutions, and that’s true for all the issues that face the border, immigration …”

Salazar, in his rambling answer, went on to talk about the work of John Kerry, the former senator from Massachusetts and secretary of state under Obama. He also shared that the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, is the first woman president of any nation in North America — and also a climate scientist by training.

She has a bachelor’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in energy engineering. She served as a lead author for a chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2013.

Salazar also lamented the purging of climate change from the lexicon of federal agencies.

“Not far down the road at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at NREL (renamed by the Trump administration the National Laboratory of the Rockies), you can’t say the word climate anymore. At my old Department of Interior, the Bureau of Reclamation, the United States Geological Survey — they’re banned from using the word climate change. How can that be?”

If these anecdotes were interesting, the answer came up short. Yes, courage, but how exactly do we make climate change a topic that gets included in campaign conversations the way it deserves? What would he have done to move us forward?

Before he began signing a few dozen books, Salazar mentioned the new crop of political talents in Colorado and beyond. He singled out U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, of Boulder, and U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, of Aurora. He also had kind words for U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso. All are Democrats.

I waited at the end of the book-signing line, which was long, hoping to get a few more minutes of one-on-one conversation or, even better, set up a time and place he might be willing to meet, as I had previously sought to do. He begged off, saying “Come to one of my future talks. I’m so hoarse I can barely talk, and I’m very tired.”

Two hours of talking at the end of a long day will do that to a guy.

As for climate change, Salazar clearly understands the magnitude of the challenge, its importance. But as for the details, even if he had thoughts to share, that is not his first inclination on any topic.

Instead, he talks about relationships. That is how he sees the world.

In Greeley, a day after his event in Arvada, Salazar reconnected with a woman, who has a Ph.D. and is principle of Belle Romero Academy. He first met Dr. Ashley Aragon when she was seven years old.

Salazar’s focus on relationships comes through clearly in his book, which is a pleasure to read, by the way. Never does he stray far into the weeds of detail and policy. His approach is more visceral than cerebral, more heart and handshake than policy briefing books.

Still, while I acknowledge the value of a strong handshake, I must continue to wonder how he would have squared off against Donald Trump had he been the Democratic nominee in 2024.