Regarding Bill Richardson

If Obama promises the VP slot to Richardson, I can all too easily see the press trying to bring up the ancient allegations about Richardson and women, so Richardson needs to do a pre-emptive strike with this to show that the vetting on him has been done in 1992 and in 2004 and he got a clean bill of health both times:

The usually well-respected Politico Web site devotes its top story today to speculation about Gov. Bill Richardson’s supposed women trouble — is he too touchy, is there a scandal in the background, you know, the usual. It keys on Richardson’s recent statements that he was vetted for vice president by the Kerry campaign and finds some unnamed Kerry aides who say he didn’t go through the final-phase “definitive” vetting. (Very, very sadly, an earlier edition of the story incorrectly said he didn’t receive “any” vetting.)

To Richardson’s credit, the story says:

Richardson’s campaign manager, Dave Contarino, told The Politico that (Jim) Johnson (a veteran Washington lawyer and Democratic insider) told him last fall that Richardson’s 2004 vetting had covered allegations of “things with women,” and that Johnson told him he’d made two dozen calls on the matter and been convinced “that there was no there there.” …

Lanny Davis, a former Clinton aide and spokesman for the White House legal counsel, also called The Politico, on the prompting of the Richardson campaign, to aver that when he vetted Richardson for a Cabinet position in 1992, Richardson passed the detailed scrutiny.

“I ended up 100 percent convinced that Bill Richardson was not a womanizer, had not had an affair, had not done anything that had embarrassed him,” he said.

There you go.