Opinion On Richardson From The Capital Times

From The Capital Times

Richardson deserves a better look

Dave Zweifel — 6/22/2007 9:43 am

Max Gaebler, who retired as the minister of Madison's First Unitarian Society back in 1987, stopped by last week to ask a question.

Why is it, he asked, that the national press acts like there are only three candidates for the Democratic nomination for president -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards?

Looking fit and trim and obviously as feisty as ever, Gaebler likes one of the five others who have formally announced their candidacies -- Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

Richardson, he said, is right there on the issues, just as much so if not more than the three who keep getting all the ink and air time, adding that Richardson's not afraid to speak out and has the experience that the others don't.

The New Mexico governor, of course, has been in Congress, was Bill Clinton's secretary of energy and ambassador to the United Nations, and as a longtime crisis negotiator he kept North Korea under control, something that the Bush administration has been struggling to do.

I agreed that Clinton, Obama and Edwards have been dominating the news and declared the "front-runners" by much of the national media. It's yet another example of what's wrong with the way the media cover politics in these modern times. Rather than comparing their stands on the issues, the media judge candidates by the amount of money they've amassed or the personality quirks they've exhibited or how well they've done in the latest poll, which are far from meaningful at a time when few voters even know who the candidates are.

Gaebler, who is approaching his 86th birthday, brandished a letter he received from Richardson after he wrote the governor earlier in the year.

In bold letters across the front of the envelope, just above the address, were these words: "The war in Iraq is not the disease. Iraq is a symptom. The disease is arrogance."

The letter inside spells out Richardson's stands that we need to get our troops out of Iraq this year if only to dispel the notion that so much of the world has that we're there only to exploit the country's oil reserves. We must start today to undo the damage that the Bush administration has caused, he adds.

Besides, Gaebler said, Richardson's a governor, and it's the governors who have been successful presidential candidates in modern times, not senators. (John F. Kennedy was the last sitting U.S. senator to win a presidential election -- 12 elections ago in 1960.)

Now if the media would just give Richardson his due, he might just succeed, too.

Dave Zweifel is editor of The Capital Times.