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 News from Around the Americas | May 2007 
'I Hope to be the First Latino President'
 Dan Schnur - LATimes
| | Richardson enters '08 race by letting Latinos know he's 1 of them. |
Most people assume someone named Hillary is a woman. They may guess that someone whose name is Obama could be of African-American descent. But they're also likely to think someone named William Blaine Richardson belongs to a country club that doesn't allow Hillarys or Obamas to join.
Such is the challenge faced by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who made his formal announcement in Los Angeles last Tuesday, saying in Spanish, "With pride, I hope to be the first Latino president of the United States."
In the early stages of an election cycle in which the United States could see its first female president, its first African-American president or its first Mormon president, the historic nature of Richardson's candidacy has been largely overlooked.
WHY HE CHOSE CALIFORNIA
That is what brought Richardson, a former congressman, United Nations ambassador and U.S. Energy secretary who was born to a Mexican mother, grew up in Mexico City and speaks fluent Spanish, to Southern California.
But Richardson's problem is that Latino voters don't know he's Latino. Though there's no guarantee that they will vote for him simply because of his ethnicity, his trailblazing endeavor would certainly bring him a much greater share of attention from the nation's fastest-growing minority community if that heritage were common knowledge.
So rather than an Iowa cornfield or even his home state, which has the largest percentage of Latino residents (43 percent), he came to Los Angeles. The driving force behind Richardson's unusual announcement location was the growing role of Latino voters in American politics. California has about 13 million Latino residents, New Mexico 860,000.
Richardson himself can be blamed for much of the unfamiliarity with his ethnic background. Though his mother's maiden name was Lopez, he has rejected advice throughout his career to campaign under her surname. He looks less like Benicio del Toro or Antonio Banderas and more like John Belushi.
Richardson's political biography has more in common with Bill Clinton or Al Gore than Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Richardson's platform on illegal immigration, for example, hews close to the political center, emphasizing the need for stronger border protection and workplace enforcement while advocating for a path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants and for dramatically increasing levels of legal immigration. He declared a state of emergency at his state's border with Mexico and sent National Guard troops to patrol, but he assails the proposed security fence because "it flies in the face of America as a symbol of freedom."
Richardson's campaign team knows that to win votes from those whose heritage traces to countries throughout Central and South America, he must sell them on the breadth of his credentials and the nature of his policy agenda. But first he has to get their attention.
'NO ONE MESSAGE OR MEDIUM'
Democratic pollster Andre Pineda makes the case that the political interests and issue priorities of Latino voters do not differ greatly from those of the community at large: "There simply is no one message or one medium that appeals to all Latinos."
So Richardson's task is tricky. A Latino candidate with an Anglo name and centrist platform must light a fire under the communities that should contain his most loyal supporters, while delivering a campaign message with equal appeal to the rest of the electorate. Los Angeles may be the best place in the country to pull it off.
Dan Schnur was communications director for John McCain's presidential campaign in 2000. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. |
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