Pandering to the Wrong Crowd

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson says what he thinks his audience wants to hear. But he isn’t always good at knowing what that is. He said he thought homosexuality was a choice at the LGBT forum, he said Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status was God’s will in front of an Iowa crowd to whom that just sounded funny, and now this:

At the SEIU political meeting in DC today, Richardson closed his speech to SEIU members with an enthusiastic thank-you to the wrong union:

“Thank you AFSCME!”

As Marc Ambinder notes, “AFSCME is, in many states, an SEIU rival.”

And while I’m talking about Richardson, I’m reminded of a note I got from a perceptive reader, which argued that Gov. Richardson “could combine his one point plans on education and on Iraq into one point: ‘Scrap no Child, but leave no troop, Left Behind.’”