Richardson on Drudgereport

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson gets a Drudgereport links-drubbing. As a piece from a New Mexico paper describes it, Bill has been accused by his female lieutenant governor of often pinching and poking and squeezing her to the extent that she now tries not to sit next to him at functions.

BORING PERSONAL ANECDOTES

Bill Richardson knew [and claimed to be rejected when he asked for a date with] my wife Marilyn when they were both undergraduate students at Tufts in Medford, Mass. My wife went on to work as a Legislative Assistant for a Democratic Senator and they stayed in touch socially. Bill was married and I soon married Marilyn, and we ended up throwing a fund-raiser for Bill at our DC home while he was running for re-election as a N.M. Congressman.

Anyone who knows Bill knows he is a hail-fellow-well-met guy. He’s a very disarming, arms over the shoulder buddy-buddy type of fellow. He has few personal or political enemies. The Lt. Gov. has since withdrawn her remarks.

That evening at our house, he buttonholed me for a minute and as we sipped Scotches, he described a meeting that day with Ted Turner about CNN and shared the confidence that Ted was so drunk he began gatoring on the floor of Richardson’s office. He was full of inside gossip on the political wackiness on both sides of the aisle.

Subsequently, when I was editor of a daily oil newspaper, Bill would often give me a lot of inside info on the Hill and about the industry from a very well-placed and astute perspective. He even put a couple of my articles in the Congressional Record.

Bill, simply put, has an amazing gift to bring out the almost always the best of those he meets. Clinton prized his ability to negotiate with hard cases so much that Bill made a tour of some of the awfulest places on earth, specializing on North Korea, just because Bill’s compassionate empathy fooled his negotiating adversaries into thinking they could gull this bleeding heart.

Not so. Again and again, Bill demonstrates that he serves as a useful emollient in keeping the abrasive edges of diplomatic fault-lines from locking.

His knowledge of energy politics and problems makes him a rare bird on the Democratic team, who often view energy as below their exalted mission to be the socializing nanny to the chattering classes and the backstairs burger flippers in whose direction they throw a program or two.

With credentials in energy and defense, Bill should get a look-see as a VP candidate in 2008. The fact that he is half-Hispanic [his mother lives in Mexico City] and considers illegal immigration the largest problem facing the USA [he told me over 20 years ago] makes him much more interesting than the Beltway-Boston Left Coast liberals jockeying for the VP position in 2008.

Bill has already got a book out, so his machinery begins to be assembled for a bid for national office.