Bill Richardson Makes South Carolina Swing
NEW MEXICO GOVERNOR TESTING PALMETTO STATE’S POLITICAL WATERS THIS WEEKEND
FITSNews - January 12, 2007 - True, we don’t know everything there is to know about New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. Hell, we just Googled him for the first time yesterday.
But for some reason - and we can’t put our finger on it yet - this guy seems just like he’s ten times more qualified than anybody running for President right now, Republican or Democrat.
Now we’ve never met Richardson, and it could very well be that he is no good at billiards, or listens to Abba or has never seen Groundhog Day - any one of which would automatically disqualify him from receiving our votes. Of course that’s probably an empty threat seeing as we haven’t voted since 1992. But we’ve thought about voting since then. And it could happen again. Maybe.
Richardson - who won reelection two months ago courtesy of the biggest landslide in New Mexico history (68.8% to 31.2%) - is in South Carolina this weekend to give the keynote address at the S.C. Democratic Party’s Second Annual Governors’ Appreciation Dinner.
Of course - surprise - it’s not entirely a social visit.
Richardson will be having several high-level political meetings in Columbia and Greenville, most of them reportedly engineered by longtime Fritz Hollings’ aide Crawford Cook. Richardson’s Saturday schedule also includes face-time with key media - thirty minutes with The State’s Lee Bandy and Aaron Gould Sheinin and another sit-down in Greenville with the News‘ Dan Hoover.
It’ll be a rare opportunity for the South Carolina press corps to hang out with a governor who can actually talk about cutting income taxes - in something other than the hypothetical sense, that is.
Unlike South Carolina’s governor, Richardson was successful in securing a gargantuan income tax cut for New Mexico - lowering the state’s top marginal rate from 8.2% to 4.9% over a five-year period.
Democrat, Schmemocrat. That’s the kind of allegiance to the Laffer curve we love to see, no matter what letter is in front of your name.
Richardson also seems to have a leg up on the rest of the field when it comes to foreign policy.
As we pointed out on this site last week, Flavor-of-the-Month Barack Obama can talk about peace in Darfur to the Hollywood A-Listers all he wants, but Richardson is the guy who actually made the trip this week and negotiated a 60-day ceasefire in this troubled region of the Sudan.
With fourteen years in the U.S. Congress, two years as U.N. Ambassador, four years as Energy Secretary under Bill Clinton and four years as Governor of New Mexico, Richardson’s political resume is one that any 2008 hopeful would kill for - although we have not yet determined whether that resume is pink and scented like Elle Woods’ in Legally Blonde. Our guess is that it probably is not.
After all, this is somebody who dressed up as an Old West sheriff in a clever, albeit disjointed 2006 campaign commercial. And a man who isn’t at all afraid to put on a bolo tie.
Of course whoever has been updating Richardson’s Wikipedia Page is clearly not a fan, as it prominently highlights his opposition to a cockfighting ban (recently an issue in SC), his controversial 2006 veto of an eminent domain bill (recently an issue in SC) and the infamous Wen Ho Lee scandal, in which Richardson has been accused of improperly leaking the identity of a Taiwanese American scientist who was later cleared of espionage charges.
So on the whole, how do we think Richardson would play in South Carolina?
Honestly, it has the potential to be one of his tougher states.
Not only will he have to deal with the name ID and war chests of Clinton and Obama, but South Carolina also happens to be native soil for former Vice Presidential nominee John Edwards, who won the state’s Presidential primary in 2004.
Unfortunately for Richardson, South Carolina also has a relatively small Hispanic population, which takes away a natural base of support for his presumptive candidacy.
Richardson does have some potentially potent Palmetto supporters, though. For example, he served in the Clinton Cabinet alongside former two-term S.C. Governor Richard Riley, who will be a guest of honor at the Greenville dinner, and his ties to Crawford give him an inside track with the still-formidable network of former U.S. Senator Ernest F. Hollings.
For us Laffer lovers, it will be interesting to see how well a tax-cutting Democrat like Richardson plays in South Carolina. We think if he can hone that message to swing pocketbook voters while emphasizing his extensive government and foreign policy experience against the inexperience of candidates like Obama and Edwards, he could make things interesting here - and elsewhere.
We’ll see what the experts have to say in their upcoming Sunday political columns, but Richardson is definitely a going to be a wild card worth watching as campaign ‘08 heats up in South Carolina.
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