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 Editorials | Issues | May 2007 
The Pro-Familia Candidate
 Joel Achenbach - Washington Post
A couple of months ago a reporter in Washington asked Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson why he thought he could do well next year in the California primary. Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, paused for a moment, stared at his questioner, and then ran through a comprehensive, policy-oriented list: Western governor, strong on environment, solid on immigration, pro-growth to please the Silicon Valley folks, and so on.
He paused. Leaned forward.
"Plus I'm Hispanic," he said. "Did you know that?"
He was teasing, but it's a real strategic issue for a candidate with a vanilla name. He's convinced that even a lot of Hispanics don't know his background - that he's the son of an American father and a Mexican mother and spent his childhood in Mexico City until coming to America to start the eighth grade.
It's no accident that he chose Los Angeles as the place where he'll announce officially today that he's seeking the presidency.
"I'm not running as a Hispanic candidate, but I'm trying to convince Hispanics that I am Hispanic, and they don't know," he told The Post during a swing through Washington last week. "I go to Los Angeles, they don't know I'm Hispanic. When they know, it's positive. So it's a question of building that."
The name throws people off, he said. But he's also never played up his ethnicity.
"I think of myself as an American governor who happens to be Hispanic and is very proud of it. I've never run as a Hispanic."
Which means?
"That you only deal with Hispanic issues, that you only appeal to Hispanic voters. And I've never done that. In a state like New Mexico, where you have to appeal to conservative voters, Anglo voters, Native American voters. You have to appeal to all voters."
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have stirred discussion about gender and race in presidential politics, but Richardson's ethnicity hasn't gotten much attention. Partly this is because Richardson's echo-chamber message has been experience, experience, experience. His pitch is that he's a doer, an executive, not just one of those senatorial windbags. He knows that Americans tend to go for governors in presidential elections.
He was elected to Congress in 1982, and later served as ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of energy in the Clinton administration. Along the way he became known as an international troubleshooter, and found himself in sensitive negotiations with the likes of Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. It's an impressive résumé, though collectively it may make him seem all over the place. A man with a fuzzy profile.
He hopes to find a way to rise to the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates. In the first Democratic debate he never looked comfortable and got kind of lost in the shuffle. He's reputed to be a first-class retail politician ("You know, I hold the world's handshaking record"), but confesses that he's still getting the hang of being a candidate: "I admit I don't have my shtick down yet."
That may include being somewhat unsure when and how to talk about his background, about growing up in Coyoacan, and playing baseball with the poor kids in los barrios bajos, the tough neighborhoods. He addresses it most directly in his memoir, "Between Worlds," when he writes that America is becoming increasingly multicultural:
"I am representative of that multicultural future: When I first got involved in New Mexico's elective politics, the joke was that I was the perfect political candidate for the state: I have an Anglo surname, I speak fluent Spanish, and I look like a Native American."
To this day, he and his mother speak only in Spanish - she still lives in Mexico City, and he phones her every Sunday.
"When I was growing up, I didn't know whether I was more Mexican or American. Because I hung around with very poor Mexican kids in my neighborhood and played baseball with them . . . but I was also hanging out with some of the kids of my father's friends, who were American. So I was navigating between both of those worlds."
His father, William Blaine Richardson, had been dispatched to Mexico City as a branch manager for the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank). At the age of 46 he married his 22-year-old secretary, Maria Luisa Lopez-Collada. As a father he was, according to his son, cold and demanding. He constantly pushed his son to do better. After young Bill finished seventh grade, the elder Richardson vowed to send him to America to be educated. The boy didn't want to go; his mother didn't want him to go either. The father's word was law, and Bill Richardson left home for Concord, Mass., and the elite boarding school Middlesex.
Result: culture shock, misery, alienation.
"When I came to Middlesex it was BOOM, you're an American. And you've got to assimilate. And, you know, they'd call me Pancho, and I was a little darker, and I was shy. And I had difficulty adjusting right away to the academics. Because all of a sudden it was all in English."
He thought in Spanish. He dreamed in Spanish. Gradually he evolved into thinking in English. But in the meantime, he evolved into a big man on campus, because he was an outstanding baseball player, a virtually unhittable pitcher who could also clobber the ball at the plate.
"It was baseball that was the bridge, for me, to be accepted as an American, because I made the varsity team that first eighth-grade year."
The Constitution limits the presidency to people born in the United States. Richardson meets that provision only because his father sent his mother by train to California just before she went into labor. He was born in Pasadena, Calif. Then his mother took him promptly back to Mexico City.
"My father had a complex about not having been born in the United States," Richardson said. His father, son of a biologist who collected museum specimens, had been born on a boat heading to Nicaragua. "If my father didn't have this complex, I wouldn't be able to run for president. I wish I'd thanked him. One of the regrets I always have is that I never thanked him."
The taskmaster father died, after a battle with Alzheimer's, in 1972. The younger Richardson writes in his memoir that he and his father had a loving relationship, and he dismisses suggestions made by friends that his father was emotionally abusive. But in the interview he hinted at wounds that never completely healed:
"He was very stern. He was a lot older than my mother. I was 23 when he died. I was mainly sent away to school."
Richardson writes that, like his father, he tends to be too demanding of his subordinates, and that he's too likely to say, jokingly, "You're fired," rather than "Good job." But he also prides himself on his diplomatic skills, particularly his ability to deal with dictators. For example, in 1995, as a congressman, he negotiated the release of two Americans imprisoned in Iraq. He succeeded after a tense meeting in Baghdad with Saddam Hussein (the testy dictator briefly stormed out of the meeting because Richardson crossed his legs, thus revealing the sole of his shoe, which is considered an insult in Arab culture).
"The fact that I was brought up in a bicultural background helps me be a negotiator as a diplomat, as a politician," he said.
Recently someone in California asked him to do a fundraiser for Huntington Hospital, where he was born, and talk about his California roots.
He answered, "My roots are about three hours."
But he's becoming more of a native son as the primary gets closer. California has moved its primary to Feb. 5, early enough in the calendar to be pivotal. His résumé can add another credential:
"I say I'm a Californian." |
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