Richardson Grok

No Hablo Espanol in This Debate

By Emily Esterson, 9-11-07

Careful, careful, Bill Richardson. You don’t want to seem like you’re whining about the fact that you didn’t get to show off your command of la lengua de Espanol. To some observers, though, that’s exactly how the governor of New Mexico is sounding right about now. During a televised debate on Univision, the nation’s largest Spanish language network, Richardson was forced to hear the questions through his ear piece in English, and respond in English, letting the network translate those responses to Spanish.

According to the International Herald Tribune, Richardson expressed his outrage at not being able to speak Spanish: “I felt it was a gag that was unfortunate because here you had the leading Hispanic network in the country not allowing Spanish. It was a bow to the so-called front-runners who didn’t want us to show off our Spanish,” he said at a news conference to announce a Hispanic outreach program for his campaign. There’s an old saw in New Mexico that perhaps Richardson heed in making his quest for Hispanic voters: If you want to run for office in New Mexico, have a Spanish-sounding last name.

And well, he’s also not too happy about the fact that former Denver Mayor and Secretary of Transportation Federico Pena (no doubt of his family origins) endorsed the African American candidate Barack Obama rather than himself. Richardson told the Denver Post’s politicswest.com he was “disappointed” that Pena chose Obama.  “We were colleagues in the (Clinton administration) Cabinet. It would have been nice to get a heads-up,” he said.  Richardson didn’t say, particularly, that he expected Pena to endorse him as a fellow Hispanic, but the undertone may well be there. No matter what language you’re speaking, two words always pop up in campaign season: Change and Experience. Experience and Change. Barack Obama has the lock on change. Hilary Clinton has the copyright on experience. But Richardson, in a new series of ads launched recently, wants to lay claim to both, MSNBC writes in its roundup of the Richardson ads.

Reason Online writes today of the Libertarian west, citing down-in-flames Larry Craig from Idaho and Bill Richardson as representative of the interesting dichotomies of western states’ politics. The quote unquote libertarian nature of the West—not that we’re registered libertarians, but that we stray far from the party line and distrust a Washingtonian hand hovering over us— means the Rockies and the Southwest are hard to predict, politically speaking--not blue, not red, sometimes both.  Yes, writes Jesse Walker, Reason’s managing editor, Craig’s alleged restroom antics didn’t have an impact on his policies toward gay rights, but he was responsible for excising some of the more heinous provisions of the Patriot Act.  Richardson has stumped on an aggressive pullout of Iraq policy, but as ambassador to the U.N. he was a “conventional internationalist.” So where does that leave Richardson? Progressive or conservative? Democrat or Republican? I do suspect that the Southwest’s individualist culture, with an outlook similar to Idaho’s but more socially tolerant, encourages local pols to pitch themselves accordingly. Some statesmen you admire for their stances; others you like for their constituencies, writes Walker.

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