NYT, pg1: Personal Touch for Richardson in Envoy Role

The Long Run: The Diplomat
This is part of a series of articles about the life and careers of contenders for the 2008 Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.

Personal Touch for Richardson in Envoy Role
By JODI KANTOR
Published: December 21, 2007


(Zaheeruddin Abdullah/AP)
AFGHANISTAN Meeting with Taliban officials in Kabul in 1998.

....Mr. Richardson, 60, is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, running not only on his years as an elected official — he was a congressman from New Mexico and is now governor — but also on his parallel career, as a self-appointed and official diplomat. He argues that no Democratic candidate has as much international experience and puts withdrawal from Iraq at the center of his pitch. A recent New York Times/CBS poll puts him a distant fourth in Iowa, New Hampshire and nationally, leading to speculation that he could end up as a vice-presidential nominee or in a cabinet post.

A kind of at-large dealmaker, Mr. Richardson does not specialize in any one region of the world, and he has no landmark achievement — no Dayton Accords or Middle East breakthrough — to his name. He is not associated with one school of foreign policy thinking or set of positions; in fact, he says he was wrong about the first invasion of Iraq (which he opposed), the second (which he supported), as well as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he helped pass.

Instead, Mr. Richardson practices diplomacy as contact sport, whizzing from country to country, conflict to conflict, and charming, insulting, even touching his way through negotiations. (After he persuaded Saddam Hussein in 1995 to release two American aerospace workers who had wandered into Iraq, Mr. Richardson reached over to clap the dictator on the arm, causing Mr. Hussein’s men to reach for their guns.)

He is a singular creation: a governor whose mobile phone trills with calls from North Korean officials; a former United Nations ambassador who wore cowboy boots and told bawdy jokes; a negotiator who delivers tough messages cloaked in personal warmth; and a freelance troubleshooter who claims to have won release for Cuban political prisoners by needling Fidel Castro, in Spanish, first about his country’s baseball pitching and then ethnic solidarity. “You gave Jesse Jackson a whole bunch, and you don’t want to give your Hispanic brother any?” Mr. Richardson said he asked Mr. Castro, describing the conversation in a recent interview.

He believes in the sheer value of bringing adversaries, no matter how unsavory, to the table, and in his own power to make deals when others have failed....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/us/politics/21richardson.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin