LAT: Bill Richardson formally announces his run for president
In L.A. speech, New Mexico governor says his long resume prepares him to lead country.
By Scott Martelle
May 21, 2007
Flanked by local Latino leaders and a large contingent of politicians from his home state, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson formally entered the 2008 presidential campaign today, saying that his thick resume offered him an unmatched ability to tackle the country's problems at home and abroad.
The Democratic candidate, who has been running for months and has already aired campaign ads, made his announcement inside downtown Los Angeles' Millennium Biltmore Hotel. Richardson noted that John F. Kennedy accepted his 1960 Democratic nomination for president at the Biltmore.
The official entry by Richardson expands what is becoming the most diverse field of mainstream presidential candidates in U.S. history. The 59-year-old is of Mexican heritage on his mother's side, and his candidacy joins those of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the son of a black man, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), the first woman to campaign in the top tier of her party's presidential contenders.
While the staging of the announcement emphasized his ethnicity — he was introduced by Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina — Richardson himself played up his resume. It is one of the most wide-ranging among the major candidates, including stints as a congressman, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Energy secretary in the Clinton Administration.
In contrast, former First Lady Clinton is in her second term in the U.S. Senate. Obama, a former Chicago community organizer and Illinois state legislator, is in the third year of his first Senate term. Another top candidate, John Edwards, a former trial lawyer, served one term in the Senate.
"This nation needs a leader with a proven track record, an ability to bring people together to tackle our problems here at home and abroad," Richardson said.
But Richardson is not well-known, and in early fundraising — key to making ad buys to introduce voters to him — he has lagged well behind the record-setting levels of Obama and Clinton.
A Pasadena-born Democrat who was raised primarily in Mexico City, Richardson continued a theme that he established in two recent campaign ads, in which he is being interviewed by a hiring director. The ads tout his experience and joke that he might be overqualified to be president.
"Running for this office is the ultimate job interview," Richardson said Monday. "It's not just about the positions that you've held, what you've done, but your ability on day one to lead this country at a critical time in our nation's history."
Richardson offered several proposals, including a plan for withdrawing all U.S. forces from Iraq in tandem with negotiating a political truce. In a swipe at the Bush administration, Richardson said that "being stubborn is not a foreign policy."
"Only when it is clear that the U.S. will leave Iraq can the hard diplomatic work have a chance for success," Richardson said. "A negotiated political settlement, involving the warring parties and interested neighbors, is how to prevent a regional war."
Richardson returned several times to his view that the nation has been damaged internally and abroad by Bush Administration policies.
"We have to repair the damage done here at home and our reputation abroad, and that all starts with restoring diplomacy as the primary instrument of our foreign policy, and basic fairness as the primary means for solving problems," Richardson said.
He also called for aggressive policies aimed at combating global warming, including reducing greenhouse emissions by 20% in 12 years, cutting demand for oil in half and enacting fuel-economy standards to 50 miles per gallon.
On health care, he said he would require all employers provide insurance or pay a fee to the federal government. He also said he opposed the current immigration plan before Congress on the grounds that it would divide families.
Instead of building a border fence, Richardson said, the government should use the money to hire more Border Patrol agents. Those already here illegally should be able to become legal by paying a fine, passing a background check and catching up on any owed taxes. And he called for working with the Mexican government to create a "reasonable guest worker program."