THE SHORT LIST

Tuesday, December 2, 2008 4:15 PM

Richardson Could Return To Cabinet Soon

(Credit: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)

The wires are reporting this afternoon that New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) will join the incoming administration in the role of Commerce secretary, and that Barack Obama will make the announcement official at a press conference tomorrow morning. (Check back then for coverage of the presser.)

If true, this would make Richardson the third of Obama's primary opponents to find roles in the administration, continuing the trend toward a "team of rivals." It would also mark a return to the Cabinet for Richardson, who served as President Clinton's Energy secretary after a year as ambassador to the United Nations.

As detailed in the Almanac of American Politics, Richardson's tenure in the Clinton White House was not without its rough patches:

In January 1997 Richardson was nominated as ambassador to the United Nations. Here was an opportunity to be a major player in foreign policy, although Richardson was cabined in by the close supervision of his predecessor, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. But he did negotiate agreements between the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and opposition forces and secured the release of Red Cross workers held hostage in Sudan, and the foreign policy experience he was gaining seemed likely to make him a plausible vice presidential candidate in 2000 or later. The only embarrassing thing about his service was the fact, later disclosed, that at the request of a White House staffer and without asking why, he offered a job to Monica Lewinsky; she rejected it as insufficiently grand.

Then in June 1998 Energy Secretary Federico Pena resigned and Bill Clinton, eager to have at least one Hispanic in an official cabinet position, shifted Richardson to the post. This was not really a promotion: Energy is a department that is made up of several unrelated agencies, some of them with deep troubles at the time. One of those was the Los Alamos National Laboratory, from which, it seemed, secret documents about the assembly of nuclear weapons made their way to China.

Richardson was much criticized in Congress for his work on improving security in the national laboratories, and his connection to the Wen Ho Lee security case was a political liability. Later, in May 1999, two hard drives with designs of the nation's nuclear labs were found to be missing after a fire; in June 1999 he decided not to appear at a Senate committee hearing on the issue, on the grounds he had no answers; at a later Armed Services Committee hearing he was lambasted by Robert Byrd, who said he would never be confirmed for another job (the hard drives were later found behind a copying machine). He was mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate in 2000 -- the Democrats would have loved to run a Hispanic -- but his name soon fell off the list.

See Richardson's full Almanac profile here.