A First -Tier Team

How does a Presidential candidate get into that all-important "first tier"?

It must be granted that the Presidential primaries and caucuses so far have been exciting. As each one comes along—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina—there is a tingling sense of really not knowing who is going to win. The pollsters have theories, but the voters have decided.

Only up to a point, however.

In each case, the race has realistically been between just two or three candidates who have become the "first tier" candidates. The others are pretty much out of luck. It’s as if the voters just can’t keep more than three serious possibilities in their minds at once. Or maybe it’s that the media outlets have time and money only to feature two or three candidates at once. The networks can’t follow everybody around, and so they make their choices—and ours as well. Unless you were Obama, Clinton, or Edwards in Iowa, you weren’t likely to get much exposure. Likewise, if you were not Romney, McCain or Huckabee in Michigan you couldn’t attract much attention.

A sad result of the New Hampshire primary was the demise of one fine candidate who never did make the jump to the first tier, and who therefore never received the attention he deserved. In terms of sheer variety of experience, none of the candidates running this year could touch the qualifications of Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico.

Seldom has any candidate come to the quest with a better resume. Of Hispanic origin, he lived in Mexico for most of his youth. After working as a Congressional aide and for the Sptate Department, he became a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then was elected to Congress itself. He was later appointed Ambassador to the United Nations by President Clinton and then was made Secretary of Energy. Moving back to New Mexico, Richardson got more executive experience as a very popular governor, elected twice by a wide margin.

And there was more—Presidents several times asked for his negotiating skills in securing the high-profile release of Americans held abroad in places like North Korea, Cuba and the Sudan.

It’s hard to ask more of a presidential candidate in terms of experience and proven ability. If he had made the "first tier," those qualifications would have become obvious.

But he never did, and he finished fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire before dropping out.

* * *

One possibility remains for Richardson fans. Let’s say that Democrats nominate the visionary but relatively inexperienced Barack Obama. He’ll need a vice president with reassuring experience, especially foreign experience, a partner not from the rustbelt but from a vital and growing part of the country. An Hispanic candidate would be a plus, and one with a proven ability to work with others.

Connect the dots. Obama and Richardson would be quite a team. A first-tier team.