Bill Richardson Loves Him Some Obama
| New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has hinted in recent days at a de facto endorsement of Barack Obama. From the Washington Post: | |
Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Richardson said: “I just think that D-Day is Tuesday. We have to have a positive campaign after Tuesday. Whoever has the most delegates after Tuesday, a clear lead, should be, in my judgment, the nominee.”Obviously Obama is the only one that can come out of tomorrow’s primaries with a clear lead, so he is essentially calling for the party to rally around Obama after this, and force Hillary to quit backstabbing her own party and drop out. He also made clear that the backstabbing isn’t good for the party, which is consistent with his position throughout the campaign that negative attacks hurt the party, which of course all the more critical now as we have a nominee, despite the Clintons and their diehard fans refusing to admit it:
Obama has such a big lead in pledged delegates that there is virtually no way Clinton can overtake him on Tuesday. The best hope for keeping her candidacy alive, advisers acknowledge, is to win the popular vote in the two big states with contests and to break about even in the delegate hunt. Vermont and Rhode Island also will hold primaries on Tuesday.
Richardson, who has not endorsed either Clinton or Obama, warned both candidates about negative campaigning. He was outspoken in his criticism of Clinton’s new “ringing phone” ad, which suggests that Obama is not ready to become commander in chief.Yet another person with a hell of a lot more experience than Clinton has saying Obama is ready to be president, and would do a great job. I only wish he had had the courage to really endorse him a week or so ago so he could have helped him out a bit with the Latino vote in Texas…but oh well, it won’t matter when the dust clears anyway.
“I happen to disagree with that ad that says that Senator Obama is not ready,” he said. “He is ready. He has great judgment, an internationalist background.”
I also enjoy these recent responses from Obama from the same article:
“We’re still waiting to hear Senator Clinton tell us what precise foreign policy experience that she is claiming that makes her prepared to answer that phone call at 3 in the morning,” Obama said, to cheers at a town hall meeting here.
Obama rarely mentions Clinton directly in his public remarks, but on Sunday he was both expansive and blunt.
“Now in the last few days, Senator Clinton goes running around telling people that the entire campaign, according to her, is only based on the fact that I gave a speech in opposition to the war in Iraq from the start,” Obama said. “That that is the only basis of my campaign, and on the other hand she has, supposedly, all this vast foreign policy experience.”
He continued, “I have to say that when it came to making the most important foreign policy decision of our generation, the decision to invade Iraq, Senator Clinton got it wrong.”
Obama then revived last year’s disclosure that Clinton had cast her 2002 authorization vote without reading the 90-page classified National Intelligence Estimate. The document raised concerns serious enough that it prompted then-Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was chairman of the committee with intelligence oversight at the time, to vote against the war.
“I don’t know what all that experience got her, because I have the experience to know that … if the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee says, ‘You should read this, this is why I voted against the war,’ then you should probably read it,” Obama said.