Bill Richardson

I'm going to take a couple minutes here that I should really, really, really, really be working on a paper or three (and that's not just a mildly cute turn of phrase--seriously, I either need to be working on one paper or three papers. MAN, I need to finish grad school, toute de suite) and write a blog post about somebody else's blog post about Bill Richardson.

I think it's pretty much a given that Bill Richardson is kind of awesome. I also feel like he has some extra, stealth-awesomeness--that is, I bet the more you know about Bill Richardson, the more awesomeness is revealed. As this guy says, "Bill Richardson: current Governor of New Mexico, former Secretary of Energy, U.S. Congressman, head of the Congressional Hispanic ikeCaucus, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., personally negotiated the release of Americans in Iraq and Sudan, adjunct professor at Harvard, nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize." Come on. That's awesome.

However, I sadly must disagree with Bob Harris's guess that Bill Richardson is going to be Obama's pick for vice president. And I'm not just sad because of Bill's aforementioned awesomeness, but because I think the reason he won't be the veep candidate is . . . a race thing.

I was talking once with a person I know who is black, and she said she's afraid that when it comes right down to it, in the voting booths, Americans still won't be ready to cast their presidential vote for a black man. I disagreed with her, and I think the primary results in fairly vanilla places like Wisconsin and Kansas back me up. For one thing, I have a theory that when somebody is famous enough, people stop thinking of them by their race first. Greg Gumble, for instance, isn't "that black guy who broadcasts sports," he's Greg Gumble. And Obama's pretty famous. For another thing, racism is painfully Uncool. Very few people want to be a racist or for other people to think they're racist. So I think that, in 2008, a black man can be elected president.

However, I think a ticket of a black man and a Hispanic man would give more people pause. One factor here is that, although I stand by the thing I just said about racism, I feel like bias against Hispanic people is more acceptable in this day and age than that against black people, what with all the anger about immigration and whatnot. That being said, I think Bill Richardson might have been viable (and, of course, awesome) as VP had Hillary won the nomination*. It's only the combination of two non-white people on a ticket that I can't see working at this point in time. I honestly think there's a large segment of the American populace who would find it threatening, whether they would put it that way or not.

(I just want to note here that I would vote Obama/Richardson in a heartbeat, clearly. [And there's an example of what I'm talking about with people-being-afraid-of-other-people-thinking-they're-racist thing.])

If it helps, I was reading something that said Kathleen Sebelius is their top guess for Obama's VP. However, it goes without saying that there's NO WAY there ever would have been a Clinton/Sebelius ticket. No publication would even mention that possibility. At least Obama/Richardson is conceivable.

*yeah, I'm just writing her off at this point. If Time can do it, so can I. (Although, admittedly, they love Obama more than I do.)