Obama praises guv during campaign event in ABQ

With the biggest political question of the week being who Barack Obama will choose to be his running mate, the Democratic presidential candidate had strong praise for Gov. Bill Richardson during an appearance earlier today in Albuquerque.

Obama called Richardson “one of the finest public servants of our generation, somebody who has done so much.”

“You know, he can’t fit everything on one résumé,” Obama told a crowd of about 2,000 people at Rio Grande High School in Albuquerque’s South Valley.

The Obama campaign and Richardson’s staff aren’t commenting on the VP process, but speculation has increased in recent days that Richardson has found his way onto Obama’s short list.

Obama also had high praise for U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman and Rep. Tom Udall, who, like Richardson, were with him at the town-hall meeting. In praising Bingaman, his Senate colleague, Obama said, “If you look up in the dictionary the word gentleman, you would see this man’s face.” He asked the crowd to give Udall, the Democrats’ U.S. Senate candidate, “a big round of applause and your vote.”

That was the second of two events Obama held in Albuquerque today. At the first, a town-hall meeting at a library attended by a few dozen people, Obama said he hasn’t been surprised by sharp attacks from Republicans, and characterized the election as a critical choice between two contrasts.

“We’ve got to seize this opportunity, and New Mexico’s going to be critical to doing that. This is going to be a close election,” Obama said. “… If we don’t change how we do business right now, then 20 years from now we might look back and see that America has become a place that isn’t living up to its ideals and its values, that isn’t what we want America to be. I don’t accept that future for my children.”

At the high-school event, Obama spoke about compromise.

“I intend to get things done as president. … That means that, yes, sometimes we’re going to have to compromise to get things done. That’s how a democracy works,” he said. “I’m not going to be elected as monarch. I’m going to be elected as president and I’m going to have a Congress to deal with and I’m going to have constituents to deal with.”

Obama described his core principles as working for ordinary people and upholding the Constitution.

“I will never waver from those principles even if I compromise on some issues,” he said.

GOP attacks

While the first event was aimed at women, Obama’s second and larger event was focused on Hispanics, both through its location in the South Valley and the introduction of Obama to the crowd by a Hispanic woman from Albuquerque. The Republican Party of New Mexico was quick to attack in a news release, providing this quote from Marco Gonzales, a GOP attorney and former congressional candidate:

“New Mexico Hispanics, Republican and Democrat, know that Barack Obama’s big-city, Chicago values won’t play here in New Mexico,” Gonzales said in the statement. “Barack Obama will raise our taxes and increase gasoline and energy costs, making it even harder for struggling American families to make ends meet. … Barack Obama is out of touch with New Mexico’s working families and he is out of touch with issues important to Hispanics.”

The GOP was also quick to preempt Obama’s visit with a conference call hosted by U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, who called Obama a flip-flopper on energy and said Americans can’t trust him to keep their taxes low. You can listen to Wilson’s remarks by clicking here.

Video

You can watch today’s events as I did — through video that is located online. Here’s video from the library town-hall meeting:

Free video streaming by Ustream

The first part of video from the high-school event:

Streaming live video by Ustream

And the second part from the high school (I don’t know why the loud beeps are there either):

Free TV Show from Ustream