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Governor Richardson has stumbled out of the gate like a one-legged horse, and questions are being asked as to whether he can stage a comeback.
I think not:
In the first few months of the campaign, he admitted to falsely claiming for decades that he was a 1966 baseball draft pick by the Kansas City A's. He told a reporter that he supported Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during the U.S. attorneys scandal because he was Hispanic, but then called for Gonzales' resignation a few days later. He called the compromise immigration bill in the Senate a "good start" but a few days later announced he opposed it. He said his model Supreme Court justice was Byron White but changed his mind when he found out that White wrote the dissent in Roe v. Wade. To top it all off, there is the mother of a fallen Marine in New Mexico accusing him of slighting her dead son's memory, by repeating on the campaign trail an anecdote she says never happened.
All these missteps came into painful relief a week ago on Sunday, when Richardson was pummeled for an hour by Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press." By the end of the show, the candidate seemed to have sunk in his chair. He was looking at the table, not Russert, when he answered questions. At other times his eyes darted around. "I'm not perfect," he said about backing Gonzales initially because of his ethnicity. "I should not have said that," he admitted, when asked about his 1999 claim that nuclear weapons secrets were safe despite unfolding security scandals at the Department of Energy. "I got in trouble again," he said, when Russert pointed out that he claimed to be -- gulp, gasp -- a fan of both the Red Sox and the Yankees.
Not good.
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