Is Richardson the Hispanic candidate or not?

Is Bill Richardson running as a Hispanic or as an American who’s proud to be Hispanic?

There’s a fine line between the two, but the New Mexico governor, until recently, repeatedly insisted the latter is the case.

“I’m not running as a Hispanic,” Richardson told FOX News in December. “I’m running as an American who’s proud to be a Hispanic.”

That’s not what he said during a campaign stop in Colorado on Friday.

“I am the Latino candidate,” the Pueblo Chieftain quoted Richardson as saying during a news conference in that city on Friday.

Either you want to be the Hispanic candidate or you don’t.

Richardson didn’t turn up the Hispanic rhetoric until after California and Florida moved up their primaries and a poll showed that a majority of voters don’t identify him as Hispanic. I realize he’s just reacting to that and shifting his campaign strategy, but he has made stirring statements in the past about his candidacy being about unity, not ethnicity.

Were those statements of principle or convenience? Is Richardson a man who stands up for his beliefs, or who says whatever it takes to get ahead?

I know what some of you are thinking: Do any of the presidential candidates truly stand for something, or do their beliefs shift with the newest public opinion polls?

It’s a valid question.

I’m not sure, but I would make one observation. Last year, in the wake of Republican scandals in Washington, Democratic senators named Barack Obama as their spokesman for a series of ethics reform proposals. The proposals, which the Senate eventually watered down over Obama’s objections, to the point that even Obama voted against them, were originally designed to take much of the corporate money out of the system.

To set an example and avoid accusations of hypocrisy, when Obama was made the spokesman for that campaign he quit flying on private, corporate jets at commercial airline rates, a practice Senate rules allow that is widely used by members of both parties.

Instead, I discovered while reading Obama’s newest book this weekend, he started flying commercial, just like the rest of us.

I’ve said this before, but if Richardson had voluntarily placed the contributions limits on his 2006 re-election campaign that he was proposing to the Legislature in 2007, they probably would have been approved.

Since he didn’t do that, Richardson looks like a hypocrite.