Bill Richardson
William Blaine "Bill" Richardson III was elected governor of New Mexico in 2002 and re-elected in 2006. Born in California but raised mostly in Mexico City, he's a Tufts University graduate who got into government in the early 1970s. By the end of the 1970s he was a New Mexico resident with political ambitions, and in 1982 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until 1997. During the administration of President Bill Clinton he served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (1997-98) and secretary for the Department of Energy (1998-2001). After the Clinton administration, Richardson worked in the private sector, as a consultant with Kissinger McLarty Associates (headed by Henry Kissinger and former Clinton chief of staff Thomas McLarty), lecturer and corporate board member. While governor of New Mexico Richardson has maintained his status as a national figure of the Democratic party, and during the first part of 2008 he actively sought that party's nomination for the presidential race.
Extra credit: Richardson is characterized by the press as a self-indentifying Hispanic (his mother was Mexican)... After he left the Clinton administration he served on a number of corporate boards, including San Diego's Peregrine Systems (2001-02), headed up by his wife's brother-in-law, Stephen Gardner. While Richardson was on the board Peregrine executives were covering up accounting fraud that later resulted in the company's bankruptcy as well as criminal charges against Gardner.