Richardson plays the L.A. card

MOST PEOPLE know intuitively that someone named Hillary is a woman. They may guess that someone whose name is Obama could be of African American descent. But they’d likely also assume that someone named William Blaine Richardson belongs to a country club that doesn’t allow anyone named Hillary or Obama to join.

Such is the challenge faced by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who made his formal announcement in Los Angeles on Tuesday, saying in Spanish: “With pride, I hope to be the first Latino president of the United States.”

In the early stages of an election cycle in which this country could see our first female president, our first African American president or our first Mormon president, the historic nature of Richardson’s candidacy has been largely overlooked. That is what brought Richardson, a former congressman, United Nations ambassador and U.S. Energy secretary who was born to a Mexican mother, grew up in Mexico City and speaks fluent Spanish, to Southern California.

But Richardson’s problem is that Latino voters don’t know he’s Latino. And although there’s no guarantee that they will vote for him simply because of his ethnicity, his trailblazing endeavor would certainly bring him a much greater share of attention from the nation’s fastest-growing minority community once they do find out.

So rather than an Iowa cornfield or a New Hampshire gymnasium, or even his home state, which has the largest percentage of Latino residents -- 43% -- he came to Los Angeles. California’s earlier Feb. 5 primary has inflated the importance of the state’s role in the nomination process, but the driving force behind Richardson’s unusual announcement location is the growing role of Latino voters in American politics.

He has correctly decided that this is the most logical place for him to step up his efforts to become known to those voters who have yet to learn about his heritage. Although he benefits from the ethnic composition of other early stops on the campaign calendar, such as Nevada, Florida, New York and New Jersey, Southern California is home to the nation’s largest concentration of Latino citizens. California has about 13 million Latino residents; New Mexico has about 860,000.

Richardson himself can be blamed for much of the unfamiliarity with his ethnic background. Although his mother’s maiden name was Lopez, he has rejected advice throughout his career to campaign under her surname. He looks less like Benicio del Toro or Antonio Banderas and more like John Belushi.

And Richardson’s political biography has more in common with Bill Clinton or Al Gore than L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Richardson’s platform on illegal immigration, for example, hews studiously close to the political center, emphasizing the need for stronger border protection and workplace enforcement, while also advocating for a path toward citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants living in this country and for dramatically increasing levels of legal immigration. He calls illegal immigrants lawbreakers, but he honors the intentions that brought them to the U.S. and the contributions they make to our economy. He declared a state of emergency at his state’s border with Mexico and sent National Guard troops to patrol, but he assails the proposed security fence because “it flies in the face of America as a symbol of freedom.”

Richardson’s campaign team knows that ethnic pride is only the first step in a multitiered conversation. In order to win votes from not only Mexican Americans but from those whose heritage traces to countries throughout Central and South America, Richardson must sell them on the breadth of his credentials and the nature of his policy agenda. But first he has to get their attention, which is much easier to do at close range than from, say, New Hampshire. Unlike in his previous political races, though, Richardson needs strong support from Latino voters, and that all starts in Southern California.

Democratic pollster Andre Pineda makes the case that the political interests and issue priorities of Latino voters do not differ greatly from those of the community at large. In a landmark memo he wrote after last November’s elections, Pineda argued that both major political parties were mistaken in their belief that the Latino community was monolithic. “There simply is no one message or one medium that appeals to all Latinos,” Pineda wrote.

So Richardson’s task is a tricky one. A Latino candidate with an Anglo name and centrist platform must find a way to light a fire under the communities that should contain his most loyal supporters. But he must do so while delivering a campaign message with equal appeal to the rest of the electorate. Not an easy challenge, but Los Angeles may be the best place in the country to pull it off.