Is Bill Richardson running for president?
The answer seems to be that he is, or at least that he will form an exploratory committee in January that is a formal preface to a run.
He just isn’t quite doing it yet, at least officially.
Thursday’s snafu involving a FOX News interview seems to have resulted from a slip of the tongue by the New Mexico governor made to a less-than-ethical network.
Here’s the slip:
“But I’m not running as a Hispanic,” Richardson told the network. “I’m running as an American who’s proud to be a Hispanic.”
Richardson spokesman Pahl Shipley told the Albuquerque Journal that the governor misspoke in response to a hypothetical question posed by FOX political correspondent Carl Cameron and that the reporter, after Richardson told him he was not making a decision until January, took the response out of context.
“He misspoke and the reporter knew it was out of context,” Shipley told the newspaper.
Steve Terrell of the Santa Fe New Mexican reminds us this morning that this isn’t the first time a media organization reported that Richardson said he’s running. In February 2005, the Associated Press reported that Richardson told Democratic Party leaders he would run.
Richardson denied it, but the wire service stood by its story.
And, as Terrell also reminds us, Richardson has said in English during at least two public appearances in other states that he’s not running, then said in Spanish, sort of jokingly, that he is running.
FOX News also reported that former CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, are moving to New Mexico to help Richardson’s White House run. Richardson’s spokesman told me the governor had no knowledge of that.
I knew I’d seen something about this before. That’s because Wilson told the New Mexican in October, while the couple was in the state to campaign for Patricia Madrid, that he could neither confirm nor deny that he and Plame were considering a move to Santa Fe.
Richardson appeared on CNN on Thursday. Reporter Wolf Blitzer said Richardson might run in 2008, and Richardson promised to let him know if he does.
Which brings us back to the FOX News slip. Joe Monahan’s analysis this morning was great.
“Instead of taking him lumps and wiping the egg away with a serving of humor, the governor and his multi-headed press staff proceeded to make matters worse by insisting that the guv’s statement… was taken out of context and that the guv was not running for the ’08 Dem prez nomination, at least not yet,” Monahan wrote.
“We all know the rules at this level of the game,” Monahan wrote. “If there is any room for doubt, the candidate does not get the benefit of it. Why? Because you want to lead the most powerful nation on Earth. Any questions?”
“As is usual with these cases of jangled nerves under the harsh glare of the national spotlight, the reaction to the mistake was worse than the error,” he wrote. “News executives at ABQ TV stations were called by the guv’s PR machine and implored not to cover the story! What did that make them do? Cover it even more, of course.”
Richardson will announce the formation of an exploratory committee in January, Monahan wrote (Does anyone doubt this at this point?), “and reacting so heatedly to this semantic error gets him off to a shaky start in a scene crowded with heavyweights like Hillary Clinton. When he could have made light of the incident and retracted the error, he showed an unnecessarily heavy hand that will have the pundits and media poking at him again to see if they can get another rise out of him.”
It is certainly unethical for a reporter to take a comment out of context and then spin an entire story out of it, and if Richardson truly did preface his comments with a statement that he hasn’t yet decided whether to run – which seems likely – the reporter made a poor choice.
At the same time, Monahan is right: Richardson could have handled the situation better. Someone with a résumé as impressive as the governor’s should know by now how to handle such incidents.
Is Bill Richardson running for president?