Richardson Bets Chips on a Western Strategy

WASHINGTON (By Alexander Bolton, Hill) - New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is pushing to increase the weight of Western states with fast-growing Hispanic populations in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, which would give him a major advantage over other candidates vying to be the alternative to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) three years from now.

As chairman of the Democratic Governors’ Association, Richardson is well-positioned to advocate for a recalibration of the primary calendar that would favor Western states. Richardson is expected to run strongly there because he hails from the West and because of his Hispanic heritage and fluent Spanish.

Like his potential rivals for the nomination, such as Sens. Clinton, John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Richardson says he has not made a decision about running. He says his focus right now is running for reelection in 2006.

But like other Democrats considered top-tier contenders for the White House, Richardson is clearly getting ready to run. He visited New Hampshire for two days last week and while there joked about the White House implications of the visit, said Union Leader political columnist John DiStaso.

“I don’t think there was any doubt that he was testing the waters,” DiStaso said.

Richardson aides say their boss traveled north to help reelect Democratic Gov. John Lynch.

Richardson has a strong ally on the Democrats’ Presidential Nomination and Scheduling Commission, Michael Stratton, who has announced a campaign to create an early eight-state Western primary in 2008 that would include Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Several of those have burgeoning Hispanic populations.

Democratic lobbyist Anthony Podesta, a longtime friend of Richardson’s, said the governor “relies on Mike Stratton to do a lot of his politics.”

Stratton is an expert on mobilizing Hispanic voters and last year chaired the campaign of Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), one of the first two Hispanics elected to the Senate in more than 30 years.

Stratton said that Richardson has “been very supportive of the effort to get a Western primary” and that “others on the commission have been told that Richardson is very supportive.”

Richardson bolstered his strength in a handful of Western states through his 527 committee, Moving America Forward. The soft-money organization registered more than 150,000 new American Indian and Hispanic voters in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Florida for last year’s election. It turned out nearly three-quarters of a million such voters to the polls, said Amanda Cooper, one of Richardson’s political aides.

Richardson raised and spent nearly $5 million through his 527, said his chief of staff, Dave Contarino. The governor closed his 527 after last year’s election but continues to operate the charity component — classified under section 501(c)3 of tax law — of Moving America Forward.

Hispanics make up 12 percent of the electorate in Arizona, 32 percent in New Mexico, 10 percent in Nevada and eight percent in Colorado, according to the New Democrat Network (NDN), a group that spent millions of dollars last election cycle on a television campaign targeting Hispanic voters.

Richardson was one of the Hispanic leaders prominently featured in NDN’s ad campaign during the 2004 election. NDN focused on the same five states as Richardson’s Moving America Forward.

NDN President Simon Rosenberg, whose wife is from New Mexico and who considers himself a “good friend” of Richardson’s, said, “A Richardson candidacy would be an important signal that Democrats are really committed to the Hispanic population in the United States.”

Democrats “lost a lot of ground” with Hispanics in 2004, he added, noting that President Bush raised his share of their vote from 35 percent in 2000 to 44 percent in 2004. Hispanics have accounted for nearly half of the nation’s population growth since 2000, the Census Bureau reported this month.

But Richardson “is a national leader who happens to be Hispanic, not just a Hispanic political leader,” Rosenberg said, seeking to forestall thoughts that a Richardson candidacy could balkanize the Democratic primaries.

Alan Solomont, a former Democratic National Committee finance chairman who served as New England finance chairman for Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, said Richardson “has as illustrious a career in public service as anyone I know.” Solomont, who was a classmate of Richardson’s at Tufts University in Boston, also said Richardson is an outstanding baseball player who could have pursued a professional career but made a “good choice” by entering public service.

Richardson has the foundation to build a national network of donors quickly, Solomont said, because he “certainly has friends all over the country” and is positioned to cultivate new alliances as chairman as he travels across the nation on behalf of the Democratic Governors’ Association.

Richardson recently filed a campaign fundraising report showing that he has more than $3 million in his gubernatorial war chest.

He has wide government experience, having served in the House of Representatives from 1983 until 1997, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1997, secretary of energy from 1998 to 2000 and New Mexico’s governor since 2002.

Richardson has among the strongest foreign-policy credentials of the top-tier Democratic presidential candidates.

In late 1994, Richardson was on a trip to North Korea on the same day that an American military pilot was shot down and captured there. Working closely with then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Richardson helped secure the officer’s release (and later wrote a first-person account of the saga for The Washington Post).

Six and a half months later, on his own initiative, Richardson traveled to Iraq and successfully negotiated with Saddam Hussein to release two American contractors captured after inadvertently straying across the Kuwait border.

Those coups and his experience at the United Nations mean Richardson is regarded as an expert on North Korea and Iraq and is often invited onto political television shows to give his opinion about them now that they are among America’s chief foreign-policy concerns.
Richardson is also quick to note that he served nearly eight years on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

He says he is no longer the liberal on domestic issues that he was when in the House. “When I came to the House, I would say that I was a progressive and spending issues were not at the top of my list,” he told The Hill, “I evolved into being more for pro-growth economic policies in the Clinton administration.”

Richardson said he did not become a forceful advocate of fiscal responsibility and tax cuts until he was elected governor.

“It’s been a fiscal evolution,” he said, quipping, “When you’re a congressman, the deficits are not a priority.”

(Supporters often remark on his affable humor, saying it is part of why he is able to connect with people.)

As governor, Richardson slashed New Mexico’s income-tax rate from 8.2 percent to 4.9 percent and increased tax deductions available to lower- and middle-income taxpayers. He also created new tax incentives for business. The libertarian Cato Institute rated Richardson the highest of any Democrat in the nation on its recent biennial fiscal-policy report card and praised him for “cutting taxes and strictly limiting increases in state spending.”

Contarino, his chief of staff, said Richardson cut the income tax to make the state competitive with nearby states such as Texas and Nevada, which have no income tax. Economic growth spurred by the tax cuts has boosted revenue and led to a budget surplus close to $500 million, Contarino added.

Richardson’s position on free trade has also evolved. While in the House, Richardson was a passionate supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and drummed up support for it as chief deputy House whip despite Democratic leadership opposition.

“I was among those who urged passage of NAFTA, hoping that the side agreements on worker rights and the environment would work, and they basically haven’t,” he said. Because those side agreements didn’t work, Richardson said, he has “tempered [his] support of free trade a bit.”

The shift could be an effort to shore up his relationship with labor leaders, whose endorsements would be a major boost to any candidate in a Democratic presidential primary.

Richardson has weaknesses. His allies acknowledge that he is little-known to Democrats around the nation. He ranked behind Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) in an April Marist College poll about a hypothetical Democratic presidential primary.

Richardson may face negative publicity about his tenure as secretary of energy in the 1990s, when hard drives containing classified information went missing from a department vault, and about congressional testimony by Notra Trulock, an intelligence chief at the department, that Richardson leaked physicist Wen Ho Lee’s name to the press as the government’s prime suspect in an espionage probe.

Richardson said he was dropped from the list of potential vice-presidential candidates in 2000 because of controversy surrounding his time at Energy.