Richardson to quit race

NY Times:

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico is pulling out of the presidential race, after coming in fourth in both the New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucuses, according to people with knowledge of his decision.

Mr. Richardson made the decision after returning to New Mexico Wednesday and meeting with his top advisers, they said. He is expected to make an announcement on Thursday.

His withdrawal removes a candidate who had a hard-edged message of immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq, but tempered it with humorous television advertisements that emphasized his wide-ranging résumé in a clever way.

In New Hampshire on Tuesday, Mr. Richardson won less than 5 percent of the vote.

In Iowa last Thursday, he finished with 2 percent of the caucus vote, having spent weeks campaigning in the state and flooding the airwaves with commercials that portrayed him as a job seeker in front of a bored interviewer, unimpressed with his extensive résumé.

For a while, Mr. Richardson was in double-digit territory in Iowa, but his standing diminished as the campaigns of Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton gained strength. It is unclear who will gain Mr. Richardson’s supporters.

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Richardson's experience did not help him develop sensible policy positions particularly on the war in Iraq where he wanted immediate defeat. He was just dead wrong on that issue, and took a more extreme position than either Clinton or Obama who have been awful on the issue. If he had been the voice of reason on the war he may have had a somewhat better shot, but he also failed to have the charisma of Obama to rise above the disadvantages his brand of identity politics, i.e. Hispanic voters, had in the first two states.