More on Richardson
Richardson has an impressive resumé. He worked in the State Department as a Congressional liaison after college, and afterwards worked as a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He spent 14 years in Congress representing New Mexico, starting in 1980, mostly focusing on foreign affairs. He moved from that position to the leadership of the Democratic Party, working with Bill Clinton on bolstering the party's credibility with the center. Clinton appointed him as ambassador to the UN, where he served a year, and then as the Secretary of Energy from 1998 until Clinton's term ended. In 2002, he ran for and won office as governor of New Mexico, winning re-election last year.
This gives Richardson an incredible amount of applicable experience for the Presidency. He has extensive foreign-affairs experience; he has plenty of contacts in Congress and a long history of working between the legislative and executive branches; and most of all, he has solid executive experience that all of the other main candidates for the nomination lack. In fact, compared to Richardson, the rest of the pack look like amatuers playing at national politics.