Okay, aside from the unfortunate hed ("Bill Richardson Seeks Clinton Scraps"), the latest NYO also has a halfway-decent piece on Bill. I give it only a "halfway-decent" because, in addition to that stupid phrasing, it also includes a bit of the MSM focus on how far he supposedly lags behind Clinton and Obama.
On the other hand, reporter Jason horowitz has actually done a good job of packing the piece with résumé snippets and campaign anecdotes that demonstrate Richardson’s qualifications. The third graf notes Richardson’s whirlwind appearance schedule on his trip this week to New York City:
The stocky, voluble governor of New Mexico had just finished a grueling day of stump speeches and political pitches to donors in six separate private fund-raisers around town. He capped that off with a speech, and then an hour-long question-and-answer session in a packed West Side bar full of young Democratic professionals. The next day, he had six more fund-raisers. On Wednesday, he was booked to appear on The Daily Show.
Ah, yes, The Daily Show. The Daily Show, which I couldn’t watch tonight, because I’m stuck in fundyrepublicanville tonight, and absent a sat dish, no John Stewart, no Stephen Colbert. No, the local cable company doesn’t make it a part of the cable package - unless, that is, you want to pay the premium rates that approach $100/month. I don’t know about you, but there are many vastly more important things on which I could drop that hundred bucks a month than frigging television. But I digress . . . .
Back to Horowitz’s coverage of Bill: Grafs four, five, and six are devoted to Richardson’s experience and expertise. One thing about Bill - he’s got a healthy ego, which he’s gonna need to overcome the MSM’s chosen narrative. Fortunately, he ain’t shy about flogging his cred:
Mr. Richardson, whose long and impressive résumé in government and foreign affairs has earned him enough attention to gain him thinking-man’s-dark-horse status in the crowded field of Democratic nominees, is working hard to break into the elite club of front-runners, which includes Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.
He served 15 years in Congress before acting as Energy Secretary in the Clinton administration and turning in a generally admired stint as U.N. ambassador. He is the first major Hispanic Presidential candidate, and his two terms as governor of traditionally Republican New Mexico are another asset—especially because, as he informed the young crowd sipping pints of ale Monday night, “We elect governors in this country.”
At the crammed event organized by Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century, a group of politically active professionals, Mr. Richardson reminded his audience several times that, as a foreign-policy envoy in Iraq and the Sudan, and as a governor, he had participated in the major events of the day while his rivals were onlookers, busy obsessing about the nuances of their Senate votes on Iraq. “A lot of candidates talk about voting a certain way, and ‘This is my position,’” he said. “I’ve done it. I’ve brought countries together.”
"The thinking man’s dark horse." I like it, except for the obvious - um, Jason? More than half of all voters are women. And plenty of us are ‘thinking women" - women who intend to vote for Richardson precisely because we vote with our brains.
And thank God for Larry Sabato (now there’s a phrase that, a couple of years ago, I never thought I’d write). He flogs Bill’s credentials, too:
“You look at those four”—Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Richardson—“and it’s almost embarrassing, because he is clearly the most qualified to be President,” said Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. “It has got to bother him that people with far less experience seem to be dominating the landscape. Richardson hasn’t made an impression on people.”
Except, of course, for that last line. Sweet jumping Jeebus, people, could we remember that the election is twenty months away?! But he’s right - it is embarrassing. And I guarantee you that it bothers Bill, but ego notwithstanding, he’s also a very shrewd and seasoned pol. He’s not going to let his game face slip this early, and certainly not over the issue of fundraising. Why? because the MSM are all wet when it comes to thise:
Mr. Richardson’s most pressing task, for now, is to post a respectable enough March 31 financial filing to keep things looking at least plausible.
Bullshit. First of all, this March 31 (2007, mind you) is an utterly arbitrary deadline created by a lethal combo of the MSM, the Beltway elite, and their own personal frontrunner creations. Second, Bill has no problem raising money. In the 2006 gubernatorial race, he pulled in more than 70% of the vote. His opponent (John Dendahl, about whom I’ll have more later) ran such a shitty campaign that Richardson really didn’t even need to lift a finger. And yet he raked in the campaign contributions hand over a fist: In a race that could hardly be called contested, in a small-population state known for campaigns on the cheap, Bill raised just shy of $14 million - for a campaign that could’ve been run for under $1 mil. Yeah, he’s up against the Clinton Money Machine. But a few months down the road, people are going to be very surprised at their relative stats.
The whole piece is interesting, but I really like one of the closing grafs:
On Monday night, as the wait staff of Zanzibar looked on in tight black clothes from behind a fluorescent-lit bar, Mr. Richardson stood on the stage and somewhat deliberately offered meaty policy answers to questions ranging from health care, taxes and civil unions to the war in Iraq and relations with Iran and North Korea.
And the hell of it is, alone among the candidates, he’s got hard experience in every single one of those areas. Those who are ready to write him off now need to sit on their hands for a couple of months. If there’s any justice to the universe at all, the Democratic primary landscape will change drastically over the months to come - and the Richardson campaign will be one of its most prominent new landmarks.
