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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
As the only serious candidate so far in the 2006 governor's race, New Mexico's Bill Richardson can afford to be in-your-face -- and to start planning for 2008.
Aug 8, 2005 | The camera does not love Bill Richardson. Close-ups, head shots, even profiles do nothing for the New Mexico governor's jowly, moon-faced countenance. No matter. Richardson seems content with a one-sided affair. "Is television here yet? You know I only do this for television," he'll say at the beginning of a press conference. A joke is often this Democrat's favored entry into a meeting. Though he is known for serious work -- as an ambassador, a Cabinet secretary and now a governor, Richardson is apparently unfazed by pomp, having seen it all before.
Sometimes he seems almost bored. There's Richardson, seated at his massive marble meeting-room table (he had it enlarged to handle a growing staff), idly twirling in his chair while other dignitaries speak. Look closer, and he's got one hand under the table, gently pulling on the chair of his second in command, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish. She smiles resignedly and tries to stabilize her chair.
But when a reporter, especially one with a television camera, addresses Richardson directly, he assumes the "serious governor" mask -- now well known to the millions of TV viewers who've seen him on "Larry King Live" or "Hannity & Colmes." His eyebrows waggle into angles, creating a solemn, skeptical pose. He squints.
The cameras click off, and Richardson looks tired. He lifts his big body off his chair and slowly shuffles to a door leading out of the room, flanked by staffers who seem perpetually antsy about his tardiness. But if a reporter dodges in between Richardson and that door, he's happy to chat for a few moments more. After a gibe or two at reporters he knows, Richardson resumes his mask, timed exactly with the camera lights, leading another day's news in New Mexico.
No governor in little New Mexico's history has come to dominate the political landscape quite like Richardson has. He is a larger-than-life character to New Mexicans, who swooned at the polls when he ran in 2002, against Albuquerque businessman John Sanchez, and elected him by one of the largest margins the state had ever seen. This in a state that swung hard for President Bush's reelection in 2004 after splitting its vote in 2000.
Now, with his reelection campaign looming in 2006, Richardson has already raised as much as $3 million. Yet he is the only one in the race; no serious candidates have emerged.
"It's hard to want to run a race when you know you're going to get whomped," says Lonna Atkeson, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
Almost from the moment he became governor, longtime Richardson allies and enemies alike saw him make some calculated political maneuvers. These moves -- headline-grabbing flourishes like cutting state taxes, meeting with international leaders and raising scads of money -- all pointed to one thing, they say: a run for the White House in 2008. In fact, with his reelection all but ensured, Richardson watchers have practically ceased to care about 2006. Instead, they are observing how Richardson positions himself for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. Richardson himself demurs on the subject, though no one takes him seriously. "I'm focused on my reelection. After that," he'll say, drawing out his words with a flicker of a smile, "we'll see."
Richardson's success in New Mexico is the result of a carefully laid-out strategy that began when he moved to New Mexico in 1978. Born in Pasadena, Calif., and raised first in Mexico City, then Massachusetts, Richardson went looking, friends say, for a place that might give his political career a good start.
"His political life story," Atkeson says, "is ambition."
New Mexico turned out to be a good fit. The dusty, poverty-stricken state (14 percent of its children live in extreme poverty, and 54 percent live in low-income households) had a bankable asset for Richardson.
"He came to New Mexico because it was a Hispanic state," says Richardson's friend and longtime campaign assistant, Jamie Koch, a Santa Fe insurance salesman. "He felt if he was to have any career in politics, he needed to be in a state that had a majority of Hispanics." (Hispanics constitute about 42 percent of the population.)
Koch recalls meeting a "very appealing, very aggressive individual" who inserted himself into the state's Democratic Party apparatus and never looked back. After losing his first congressional bid in 1980, Richardson won a seat in 1983 and held it for seven terms. In Congress, he caught the eye of President Clinton, who thought he might make a skillful diplomat.
Richardson jumped into his role as ambassador to the United Nations, and thus began his jet-setting lifestyle. In episodes that still resonate today, Richardson won the release of several American hostages from the governments of North Korea and Sudan. After that he went to Iraq, where he was one of the first Americans ever to sit down opposite Saddam Hussein. (Richardson once recalled a faux pas in that meeting wherein he crossed his legs, inadvertently showing the Iraqi dictator the sole of his shoe, a grave insult; they got over it.)
