Bill Richardson v. his resume.

Des Moines, Iowa 'Are you ready for some hot dogs?" says the ballpark announcer. "Let 'em know!"Bill Richardson is ready. It's been a grueling day on the campaign trail-- five events spread across some 350 miles of Iowa interstate--and, as we find our seats behind home plate for a minor league game in Des Moines, Richardson looks beat. A New Mexico wag once compared the governor's appearance to an unmade bed, and, right now, he looks the part. His black hair is tousled and his tie is gone. His collar is smeared with pancake makeup and his lapel is dusted with white specks of unknown origin. But Richardson still has plenty of energy left--not only for a hot dog, a bag of popcorn, and a Diet Coke, which he asks his state trooper to fetch--but also to discuss his recent trip to North Korea to retrieve the remains of six American soldiers killed in the Korean war. "Maybe about two months ago," he casually explains, as if describing some political horse-trading with his legislature, "the North Koreans said to me, 'We want to do a gesture to you because we like you. You've been interested in remains. We're ready to give you from five to ten--unconditional. But you have to come and get them.'" The call, Richardson clarifies, came through the United Nations. "Their U.N. guy calls. His name is Ambassador Kim. K-I-M. They're all named Kim." Richardson then contacted Bush's national security advisor, Steven Hadley, and told him he wanted to make the mission a bipartisan affair. Truth is, he just needed a ride. "What I was mainly interested in was an airplane," Richardson says as his food arrives and he maneuvers the overstuffed hot dog into his mouth. "So Hadley said--" Richardson pauses and turns to his trooper. "Jakey, you got a napkin?" The trooper passes Richardson a napkin, and he dabs his chin. "So Hadley said 'OK.'" The hot dog is soon gone, and Richardson is finishing the popcorn now, as well as his North Korea yarn. "The White House said, 'We want to have Victor Cha'"-- the National Security Council's top Korea expert-- "'come too.' I said, 'Well, that'd be a signal. The North Koreans will like that.' I said, 'We need a plane.' Hadley said, 'Yeah, I know you do. I knew you were going to ask.' And I said, 'Well, how the fuck else are we going to get there?' And so we got a nice G5." This is the essence of Richardson's appeal--that he can blend seamlessly into a crowd of AAA baseball fans (unlike, say, John Kerry) while chatting about his negotiations with a member of the axis of evil (unlike, say, George W. Bush). Although many Democrats are smitten with Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, Richardson is enjoying a moment of heightened voter interest, even passing the psychologically crucial barrier of double-digit support in one Iowa poll. He is both the hot-dog-and-ballgame everyman and the seasoned international statesman. The latter is particularly alluring to an electorate yearning for the anti- Bush: someone with the foreign policy chops and diplomatic skills to repair America's tattered reputation and alliances, someone who understands the granular nuance of nuclear proliferation and the Iraq conflict and who isn't afraid to talk to our enemies. This hunger for a leader who will undo the foreign policy of the Bush years is particularly powerful in internationalist Iowa, a state with a long tradition of peace churches, almost no military industry, and farmers who have always preferred selling to America's foes rather than isolating them. As Richardson and I chat about North Korean nukes, a middle-aged man shyly approaches the governor. "I just wanted to say, there's a lot of us here in Iowa who realize we need somebody like you to run our country," he tells Richardson. "I think your message of how much experience you've got in dealing with all the foreign policy, I think that rings really true here." Everything about Richardson's impressive resume seems to support the confidence that voters like this one have in him. He's a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and he served as a foreign policy aide in Congress and at the State Department. As a congressman in the 1980s and 1990s, he made a name for himself as an international troubleshooter, parachuting into rogue states for face-to-face negotiations with dictators. His recent North Korean adventure shows that, even as governor of New Mexico, he has continued his role as America's de facto "undersecretary for thugs," a nickname he gave himself in the Clinton years. Then again, a good resume is not all it takes to win the nomination, and there are some signs that Richardson may not be the perfect candidate. In fact, as we get up from our seats to visit the play-by-play announcer's booth, Richardson does something I've never seen any politician do. There are two women sitting in front of us. They are both young and attractive, probably in their twenties. The governor rotates his large frame sideways and shimmies out of his row. The two women smile up at him. As he passes, Richardson reaches down and places his fingertips on the head of one of the women, tickling her scalp as he opens and closes his hand. Then, as he reaches for the next scalp, his hand suddenly aborts its mission, as if the governor realizes this wasn't such a good idea after all. Richardson's touching problem isn't exactly news. In 2005, his lieutenant governor, Diane Denish, told The Albuquerque Journal that she goes out of her way to avoid sitting or standing next to Richardson because he's a little too grabby. "He pinches my neck. He touches my hip, my thigh, sort of the side of my leg," she told the newspaper, which illustrated the story with a photo of Richardson smiling mischievously as his hand reached around toward Denish's backside while the two sat next to each other at a public event. The truth is that Richardson touches everyone this way. He routinely twists staffers into headlocks and pokes or bear-hugs people he's just met. At one event, I saw him grab a beefy union guy by the lapels and shout into his face, "Stay loose! No commitments yet!" His "political trait," he writes in his recent memoir, is to get "up close and personal." It's part of his charm and makes him a natural politician (he is, after all, the Guinness Book of World Records champion for a politician shaking the most hands in eight hours--13,392 at the New Mexico State Fair in 2002). It's also what enables him to negotiate with dictators--to treat them with the same level of cordiality as more upstanding members of the international community. But Richardson's informal style is not without its drawbacks. On the most basic level, giving an unsolicited scalp tickle to a stranger is peculiar behavior for a presidential candidate, and Richardson's touching has fueled a nasty whisper campaign that he's unelectable. But, even if you put aside those rumors, Richardson's style betrays deeper problems with him as a candidate. It's midday, and 50 elderly Iowans are gathered at the Witwer Center in Cedar Rapids to hear Richardson's stump speech. He stands on a small stage in the cafeteria as members of the audience nibble cookies and listen carefully. He's no Bill Clinton. Richardson's feet are stiffly glued to the floor, but he gestures dramatically with his hands and bends his torso in all directions at the waist. It sometimes looks as if he is doing the robot. On the issues, Richardson is to the left of, but ideologically close to, his opponents. He says he would get the troops out of Iraq, though faster than Clinton, Obama, or Edwards. He favors energy independence, universal health care, and better schools. His real argument is that he's the most experienced candidate. He delivers his pitch in a somewhat meta style. Rather than detailing his experience, more often than not, he simply tells his audience, "I have the most experience." Rather than radiating optimism through the power of his words, he simply explains, "I want you to know that I'm optimistic." But, for all his talk of experience, Richardson is not so much a foreign policy expert as he is a born negotiator. Richardson himself traces this style to a life spent navigating "between worlds," which is the title of his memoir. Even today, Richardson's ability to embrace duality is impressive: He gets accolades for being the first Latino presidential candidate, but he is also arguably the waspiest of the contenders, the only major Democrat to attend a New England prep school and certainly the only one who has written movingly about a cherished Brooks Brothers blazer. With a stern and demanding Anglo dad and a much younger and more indulgent Mexican mom, he grew up in luxury south of the border. He was chauffeured to school and saw up-close his father's hobnobbing with the Mexican and American elite, including his dad's friend Dwight Eisenhower. And yet, by day, Richardson would get into scrapes and play baseball with kids from the Mexico City slums surrounding his family's mansion. When he was sent off to Middlesex in Massachusetts--where, Richardson has noted, "the boys all seemed to be upper-middle-class or wealthy and white"--he was no longer the elite son of an American bank executive but "Pancho," the Latino kid who still thought in Spanish and had trouble with his English. "Here we go again," Richardson thought upon arrival. "How am I going to fit in? How am I going to be accepted?" He figured out he could win over his classmates by impressing them as an athlete, and he was the first eighth-grader to make the varsity baseball team. Richardson was similarly calculating about finding a place for himself at Tufts. He quickly established himself as cruise director of his class, personally organizing a trip to Mexico for his friends and rising through the ranks of his fraternity, Delta Tau Delta, to become its president. Ever the diplomat, one of his first decisions was to invite a group of Black Panthers to speak to his fellow Delts. But he also learned to relish hardnosed politics. During one contentious fraternity meeting, some brothers attempted to overturn President Richardson's ban on smoking pot in the house. A colleague recommended he invoke Robert's Rules of Order to discipline the proceedings. "What the hell is that?" a perplexed Richardson asked. Instead, he quelled the rebellion by threatening to bring in the dean of students. After that victory, he worked quietly to place political allies in key positions throughout the Tufts student government, what he's proudly called his "Lyndon Johnson moment." Although Richardson was a college student in the late '60s, unlike most of his generation he hardly knew whether he was a Democrat or a Republican. Later on, as a Hill aide, he treasured dealmaking far more than ideology. New Mexico proved to be the ideal political landscape for Richardson, and he audaciously moved there in 1977 without knowing a single person in the state. As The Economist once explained, "New Mexican politics is still about jobs, contracts and personal loyalty, not ideology. And Mr. Richardson personifies this." By 1982, he had won a congressional seat. As a freshman representative, Richardson was one of the most effective members in a class of unusually ambitious pols, including Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, Dick Durbin, and Tom Ridge. He eventually convinced the leadership to appoint him to the Intelligence committee so he could indulge his foreign policy interests. It was through that assignment that he began his freelance diplomacy. In 1992, Clinton passed over Richardson for a Cabinet slot. Richardson was crushed--"I'm hurting," he told Clinton when the president broke the news to him over the phone--but the rejection gave him the opportunity to play world statesman. The White House began to use Richardson as an unofficial envoy and back channel to regimes it wouldn't talk to directly. In 1994, he tried to convince the North Koreans to hand over two American airmen. The following year, he persuaded Saddam Hussein to give up two Western engineers who wandered into Iraq from Kuwait. And, in 1996, he sprang some Red Cross contractors from the clutches of a Sudanese warlord. At other times, he has met with Slobodan Milosevi ("wily" and "charming"), Haiti's Raoul Cedras, the leadership of Burma, and Fidel Castro ("more dandruff than I'd ever seen on anyone"). In his second term, Clinton rewarded Richardson with stints as U.N. ambassador and energy secretary. In his memoir, Richardson explains his basic diplomatic philosophy: "A personal connection can transcend even the deepest ideological differences." That's how he approaches not just international thugs but Iowans, too. But there are limits to an approach that turns every personal encounter into a kind of negotiating session. Richardson's remarks to the senior citizens are over, and the first question for him is about military spending. A woman wants to know if the governor would favor eliminating what she says is the 5 percent of the Pentagon budget that goes to "our strategic air command" and "Star Wars-era type of missile defense systems" and earmark the money for education instead. Nothing in Richardson's public statements or on his website suggests he agrees with the woman, but his instinct is to find points of agreement. First he tries the I'm-with-you-in-principle-but-not-the-details approach. "Look, I agree with you. I would redirect priorities toward human needs." But he also strains to point out that there are areas where he would increase the Pentagon budget. He wants more men and women in the Army and for them to have better armor. She frowns, and it looks like he might be losing her. He circles back to her question and promises to cut wasteful Pentagon spending, especially in Iraq, even throwing in a gratuitous jab at Halliburton. "So I'm with you," he assures the woman. But this is a negotiation, and Richardson doesn't want her to think she's won everything. "I don't want you to say, 'Well, you know, he's with me a hundred percent.'" Now the woman is confused. "So to clarify, then," she asks precisely, "are you saying, though, that five percent, or even the fifteen percent, you'd sustain within the Pentagon budget to continue to pay for things for a war machine?" Richardson begins to fold. "No, no," he says. "I think you can easily maybe even go higher than the five percent." Again, the woman wants a clarification: "And shift it into education and health care?" Richardson is faced with a choice between making a personal connection and maintaining his ideological differences. He goes with the former. "Sure. Yeah, I believe so." On March 20, 2003, the day after U.S. bombs dropped on Baghdad, Bill Richardson signed an optimistic neocon statement on the war. "Together with successful democratic reform in Iraq," it read, "the Gulf has the potential of making a clean break with a past rooted in repression and entering into the growing global community of democratic states." The statement was released by Freedom House, the human rights organization beloved by hawks and the interventionist wings of both parties. Richardson was a trustee of Freedom House and had been the organization's chairman before he became governor. Other signatories included Kenneth Adelman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Diana Negroponte, and James Woolsey. But, early this year, Richardson's neocon moment ended--right about the time he started campaigning in Iowa. His new position is about as far as possible from his old one: He wants all the troops out of Iraq this calendar year--"The difference I have with the other candidates is I'm saying no residual troops at all," he told me. And his first big speech on foreign policy, in contrast to his idealistic Freedom House declaration, called for "a new realism." In April, a few months after he gave it, I joined him in New York for a candidate forum with Al Sharpton and his National Action Network. After the event, a reporter asked Richardson under what circumstances he would use U.S. troops to intervene militarily. Without hesitation, he made the sound realist case. "Only if America's national security interests are affected," he said. I asked him what he would have done in the case of Rwanda. He paused for a moment and thought. "I would have intervened," he said, quickly adding, "I would have pushed for a peacekeeping force." And if it failed? Would he have sent U.S. troops? "I think in the case of human rights and genocide, the answer is yes." Maybe Richardson is truly a realist and was just experiencing a temporary bout of foreign policy idealism back in 2003. Or else he's always been an idealist but the reality of the Iraq war reordered his views. Or perhaps there's a simpler answer, especially once you know that, even as he served as chairman of the hyper-idealist Freedom House, he had another job: senior managing director at Kissinger McLarty Associates, the private sector redoubt of hyper-realism. The safe bet is that Richardson, despite his years on the world stage, has never developed any fixed foreign policy ideology. Or any fixed political identity, either. In 1996, Richardson, who was then nearing the end of his 14 years representing New Mexico in the House, told a reporter, "I was a conservative Democrat who became a progressive Democrat who's now a moderate." And, these days, Richardson is methodically staking out ground to the left of all his Democratic rivals. An absence of ideology might seem like the perfect antidote to the Bush years. And Richardson is not the only politician to have done an ideological flip-flop on Iraq. But, in Richardson's case, being unmoored from a clear set of principles has led to a series of errors in judgment that extends to more issues than just the war. His reputation as a foreign policy expert rests on his negotiating missions rather than on meaty policy work, and that has allowed the legend of Richardson the statesman to persist despite a history of bad calls. In 1985, he voted for aid to the Contras, a controversial position for a Democrat to take. Then the Iran-Contra scandal broke out. Richardson reversed his position and admitted he'd made a mistake. In 1991, Richardson voted against giving George H.W. Bush the authority to go to war against Saddam. Once again, he later admitted he got it wrong. "In retrospect, that was a mistake," he writes in his memoir. "The right vote was the one cast by the majority of my House and Senate colleagues, who supported the first President Bush's request for the authority to remove Iraq from Kuwait by force if necessary." In that same book, Richardson recounts how his proudest achievement in the House was the starring role he played in helping Bill Clinton pass nafta. As the Democrat in charge of gathering votes for the pro-nafta side, he was so devoted to its passage that he actually set up a joint whip operation with Newt Gingrich's team. "Nafta, in my view, was critically important," he writes in his memoir, which was published just two years ago. When I asked Richardson about his role in nafta, he said he doesn't regret his vote, but he has changed his mind about some aspects of free trade. "I guess you'd call me more of a fair-trader now," he admits. Even if he doesn't measure up on substance, Richardson's style has always been a political asset. He so dominates New Mexico politics that back home they call him "King Bill" or "Govzilla." After being reelected with almost 70 percent of the vote, he figured his New Mexico success could easily translate into Prezilla. Richardson thinks his informal approach is precisely the kind of authenticity that voters want. But, in presidential politics, where every utterance is sifted for its ideological content and examined for clues about the candidate's readiness for the job, style takes you only so far. After the first Democratic debate, during which he inexplicably declared that his model Supreme Court Justice was Byron White, one of the two dissenters in Roe v. Wade, Richardson was asked how that answer squares with his pro-choice views. Richardson challenged the very idea that White had anything to do with the Roe decision and argued that it was decided in the '80s, when White was no longer on the Court. After watching the scene unfold, the popular Democratic blogger Mark Kleiman was devastating: "He just doesn't seem very smart, or very thoughtful." Some candidates can overcome a track record of poor judgment and inconsistencies with a polished presentation on the stump. (Think Mitt Romney or John Edwards.) But, as with the Byron White head-smacker, Richardson has again and again created the impression that he doesn't know the basics. In March, Alicia Menendez, a reporter for the news channel RNN, asked Richardson how he would vote on the Iraq supplemental if he were in the Senate. "I'm just not familiar with the supplemental," he told her. "Which one is that?" At the first Democratic debate, in April, Richardson was asked if he "would vote to fund the troops." He immediately answered "no," even though that's not his position. During a recent appearance on "Meet the Press," Tim Russert confronted Richardson with a devastating catalogue of the governor's contradictions on Iraq, immigration, his tenure as energy secretary, gun policy, and--the final, cruel shot--how he could be both a Red Sox fan, as he often says he is, and a Yankees fan, as he claims in his book. Richardson seemed deeply offended by the barrage. "I've been in public life twenty-five years. You're going to find a lot of these," he sputtered. "It seems you've found them all here." Richardson is often just not that precise when he speaks, treating conversations with voters and reporters more like casual chats rather than interviews where his words will be scrutinized. Sometimes his gaffes are small and meaningless. After Al Sharpton, who has never held an elected position, introduced him at the forum in New York, Richardson said, "All the good things the governor said about me are true." Other mistakes are more eyebrow-raising. When discussing his plan to negotiate peace in Iraq, he often refers to the country's "three religious groups," a small but odd blunder for a candidate hawking his foreign policy experience, especially his deep familiarity with the Muslim world. In one Iowa forum, Richardson noted that "we also are moving North Korea toward eliminating nuclear weapons." Not exactly. The negotiations are about shutting down a nuclear facility, not getting rid of their current stockpile, though that is, of course, an eventual goal. Richardson repeated the statement in a phone interview with me, which took place after his Byron White episode, when he was trying to be particularly careful about his statements. After placing me on hold--"put him on silent or whatever, because I want to just talk to Barbara"--he clarified the remark. "Let me just amend one thing I said. My view is that they will keep some kind of nuclear presence," he said. "I don't believe they will dismantle everything." During a question-and-answer session after a speech about Darfur at the University of Northern Iowa, a student from Sierra Leone asked the governor a question about the causes of conflict. "Usually, when you have power, you don't want to give it up," Richardson said. "I remember in your country, Charles Taylor, he was around when I was at the U.N. He's no longer around, right? He's in exile somewhere. Your country still has conflict." Taylor was actually the leader of Liberia. He is not in exile but in a prison in the Hague, where he is standing trial this month. (It's one of the most important war-crimes cases since Nuremberg.) And the long-running conflict in Sierra Leone is over. After the speech, Richardson was all back slaps, winks, and nods. He gamely posed for a picture with a student who is collecting photographs of candidates holding his Mr. Potato Head doll. "Do I look like a fool or what?" he laughed. And he tried to find those points of commonality that are his trademark, even if he had to strain a little to do it. To two Sudanese students, he asked, "Do you know who Manute Bol is?" Then, turning to me, he asked the same question, explaining that Bol, an American basketball star, is a member of the Dinka tribe of Sudan. Richardson held his hand above his head. "Very tall." As I watched Richardson, I realized that there is no artifice to the man, which is an endearing quality for a presidential candidate. Lurking behind Richardson's grabby, clumsy style is a guy who will do anything to be loved. And that's how many Democrats view the United States right now--a nation that desperately needs the world to love us again. Richardson may be a good Cabinet member for the next president, but, despite his charm and likeability, the next president needs to be more than a frat-boy-in-chief who believes that personal connections can overcome all the world's ideological fissures. We've already been down that road. Back at the baseball game, where the Iowa Cubs are crushing Richardson's own Albuquerque Isotopes, the governor is a whirl of energy and one-liners. We ride an elevator to the broadcast booth. "You're the owner, huh?" Richardson says to a man escorting us. "Why are you kicking the shit out of us?" The governor settles into a chair between the Cubs' two play-by-play announcers. There's a pop fly to shallow right center. The Cubs shortstop falls down trying to make the catch, and an Isotope makes a sprint for second. "He's out!" Richardson interjects. The announcer, Toby Hyde, concurs. "Bill Richardson is right," he says. "He's out." He adds, with just a trace of sarcasm, "I'll let you call a couple of plays." Richardson's bet that the personal always trumps the ideological is soon tested. This is Iowa, after all, where even the ballpark announcers are budding David Yepsens. Hyde asks Richardson what the one thing is that people should know about him, and the governor makes his resume pitch. "It's that I've got experience," he says. "I've been secretary of energy. I'm governor of a state. I'm doing well. I've got foreign policy experience. I just got back from North Korea ... ." If Hyde is impressed, he doesn't let on. Richardson tries to keep things casual. "I just had the biggest, best hot dog I've ever had," he says. "And I'm on this diet. It makes me miserable. What a hot dog. I may have another one." But it turns out Hyde is a bit of an energy policy wonk, and, in between plays, he draws Richardson into a detailed discussion about the merits of cellulosic- versus corn-based ethanol. "How about wind?" Hyde asks. "Wind's sort of the forgotten of the renewables." Dictators may be susceptible to Richardson's nonideological approach, but Iowans, it turns out, are not. After exiting the booth, with the announcers safely out of earshot, Richardson cackles and scrunches his face. "The guy was talking to me about wind energy!" It's clear from his amused expression that he feels like the interview--and the long day of campaigning--was a success. But, as we ride the elevator down to the ground floor of the stadium, the car is quiet, and the governor suddenly gets a pensive look on his face. Has he realized his mistakes? He breaks the silence. "I'm gonna get another hot dog on the way out, " he declares. "Screw it."

By Ryan Lizza