I like Gov. Bill Richardson don’t get me wrong. He seems like a nice guy, has a lot of foreign policy experience, really seems to understand things on paper. It just bothers me that in every election, everywhere, there is always a candidate who takes the ‘nice person’ stance and repeatedly fills interviews, debates and campaign literature about the “poisonous” nature of politics etc.

Lets face facts, politics has never been about being nice. George Washington could be nice because most people loved him and would have voted him in as president for a thousand years if he could. Everyone since has had to fight for it. Richardson is going to have a hard enough time getting elected. Playing nice on top of that can pretty much guarantee it won’t happen.

I was involved with a local campaign a few years ago. We ran a candidate in an area whose people were two thirds the other party. Day one the other candidate came over and announced his intentions to run a clean race and do no personal tasks and asked to shake on it. Our candidate had small children and welcomed the idea. Then we found out the man she was running against had skeletons basically falling out of his closet. Some petty, some serious.

We lost on our positive campaign in a pretty decisive blow. We felt good about the work we had done but in all honesty the voters had no idea who they were voting for. Some of those skeletons involved things people would care about and would eventually influence that persons job. But because we were clean we couldn’t tell anyone about it.

My point is, if you want to play politics especially on the national level you are going to have to get your hands dirty. Everyone will agree with the positive candidate on principal but then vote for the fighter on another principal. The one that says ‘I want to win and I want to feel safe in the world’.