Candidate With an Eye on Edging Up to No. 3: Richardson "slowly and steadily rising in the polls"

NYT: Candidate With an Eye on Edging Up to No. 3
By LESLIE WAYNE
Published: October 11, 2007

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa, Oct. 8 — By Bill Richardson’s own admission, he is neither the richest, nor the most popular, nor the most glamorous of the Democratic candidates.

But as Mr. Richardson, New Mexico’s governor, campaigns with a strongly antiwar message — that the troops in Iraq must be withdrawn now — he has managed to stand out from fellow Democrats, and has been slowly and steadily rising in the polls. His rise has not been enough to overtake any of the top three candidates, but he is edging closer and making an already complicated Democratic race even more so.

Polls show Mr. Richardson having the support of roughly 1 in 10 voters in Iowa, and about the same in New Hampshire. He has raised a healthy $5.2 million in the July-to-September quarter, just $2 million shy of former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. And that money is translating into additional resources here in Iowa, where he now has 75 workers on the ground — about half the number of campaign workers Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois have — and 15 field offices, again about half the number the front-runners have.

One reason for Mr. Richardson’s showing has been the $2 million he has spent on a series of humorous television advertisements that are popular in Iowa and have been broadcast 4,000 times, according to Advertising Age, a trade publication. They also have had nearly 220,000 hits on YouTube.com. In what has become a campaign classic, Mr. Richardson deftly establishes his biography — former energy secretary, former United Nations ambassador and negotiator with dictators — in a series of mock “job interviews” before a bored potential employer who, while munching on a sandwich, remains decidedly unimpressed....

Yet the challenge for Mr. Richardson is whether he can break out of the “also ran” status as the fourth-ranked candidate on the Democratic side and knock off one of the top three, with his aim, according to his campaign staff, squarely on the person in the No. 3 spot: Mr. Edwards, who has been losing ground lately as the Clinton and Obama campaigns devote more resources here....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/us/politics/11richardson.html?hp