Buoyed by humor, resume, Richardson keeps looking up

M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News

Saturday, June 23, 2007

DES MOINES, Iowa - New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is a man in motion.

His hands never stop moving when he makes a point about Iraq. His body sways as he talks about energy policy. His face contorts with each mention of President Bush.

Now Richardson is trying to move in a different direction: up - as in up from fourth place in most of the Democratic polls.

Richardson is trying to do that by taking the toughest stand for withdrawing troops from Iraq, by pitching his international résumé, by touting his environmental record and by running humorous ads.

"I'm moving up," he tells reporters as he leaves an event in Des Moines on Friday. "You'll hear about it. I'm moving up."

For now, Richardson is still behind front-runners Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards in most national surveys.

But he has broken into double-digits in the first caucus state, Iowa, where Edwards leads, and a new survey shows him gaining on Edwards in the first primary state, New Hampshire.

On Friday, he brought his campaign to a forum in Des Moines. There, he stepped up his rhetoric opposing the ongoing U.S. occupation in Iraq by saying that virtually every American soldier - with the exception of Marine embassy guards - should be pulled out by the end of the year.

He is pressuring congressional Democrats to pass a resolution by the end of the summer revoking authority for the war.

"If I am president, I would only go to war if I get authority from Congress," Richardson told the audience.

"If you go to war, it's my view that first you exhaust every diplomatic option, you exhaust mediation, even sanctions, build international support for your goals," he says. "I would not hesitate to go to war if it preserved the security of this country, but I believe this administration has been too trigger happy. And I would use diplomacy."

Because he's not in the U.S. Senate, Richardson has the luxury of talking tough without having to cast votes. That has drawn some push-back from Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware - the only Democratic presidential contender who recently voted to continue war funding - even as Biden pushes his own plan to end the conflict.

Biden has said that other candidates have to face the fact that Democrats don't have enough votes to force Bush's hand.

Richardson said Friday that he is realistic, but he's going to keep up the pressure.

On the stump, he presents his Hispanic heritage and Western roots as selling points, saying Democrats need a candidate who can win states like Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. He was among those pushing for the Democratic National Convention to be held in Denver as a way of getting the party to look West for electoral votes.

"My point is that we've neglected the West. . . . We need a candidate that is electable, that can win in all regions in the country, that can win in the South, one or two states, that can win in Florida, that can win Ohio, that can pick up Rocky Mountain states," he said.

With experience as a former member of Congress, former Energy secretary, sitting governor and diplomat, Richardson's résumé is one of his big selling points. But so is his humor.

Iowa's television airwaves are filled with ads portraying him in a job interview. A foil listens to Richardson detail his environmental record only to interrupt: "What I asked you was, 'If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?' "

After Friday's event, an audience member demanded to know the answer: "What kind of tree? What kind of tree?"

Richardson laughed.

His tone won him a few new supporters in the crowd.

"I like his style," said retiree Nate Mulvihill, 63, of Des Moines. "He's very down to earth, not so Washingtonian."

sprengelmeyerm@SHNS.com or 515-244-2396