Lost Hard Drives Crash Richardson’s V.P. Hopes

Down the drain in Washington this week went not only any lingering confidence in security at the nation’s nuclear facilities, but something more ephemeral: Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson’s chances of being plucked for the Democratic national ticket.

Richardson, who is to appear next week at Senate hearings into the disappearance of critical nuclear files from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has been a player in Washington’s quadrennial summertime parlor game: Who wants to be vice president?

Presumed Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore, the only man who knows Richardson’s prospects for sure, wasn’t talking specifics Wednesday. But a consensus was that if Richardson ever was on Gore’s short list of potential running mates, his odds just got excruciatingly long.

“He’s out,” said UC Irvine political science professor Martin P. Wattenberg, who studies the vice presidency. “There are three rules for picking a vice president. Be safe, be safe and be safe.”

Richardson, to put it in the parlance of his department, is practically radioactive right now.

“All he brings you are the horrors of the bureaucracy he’s been supervising,” said South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian, who is lobbying for Gore to pick North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. as his running mate.

Gore, for his part, did not go out of his way to embrace Richardson on Wednesday.

Asked on CNN if the Energy secretary was ultimately responsible for department misdeeds, the vice president was not stirred to defend him.

“This is under investigation,” he said, adding that he had “full confidence” in the FBI probe into two missing computer hard drives loaded with nuclear weapons secrets.

Richardson, 52, appeared to be a longshot anyway--in the nearly two years since he took over the Energy Department, it has been buffeted by controversy.

In December, a Los Alamos engineer was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly copying nuclear secrets into an unsecure computer network. The engineer, Wen Ho Lee, has pleaded not guilty but remains in custody.

Along with this week’s explosive admissions about the missing hard drives, soaring gasoline prices are sure to be a continuing political headache for the agency.

The strongest argument for Richardson was his Latino heritage.

Born in Pasadena and raised in Mexico City by his Mexican mother, the former New Mexico congressman and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations filled a void in a list of vice presidential contenders dominated by white men.

California Democratic Party chairman Art Torres argued that Richardson could remain a vice presidential contender if he deftly handles the latest controversy.

“A lot of these issues were not of his doing,” Torres said, “but how he resolves it is.”