Richardson quits

From The New York Times:

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico is pulling out of the presidential race, after coming in fourth in both the New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucuses.

Mr. Richardson made the decision after returning to New Mexico yesterday and meeting with his top advisers. He is expected to make an announcement Thursday, according to sources with knowledge of the governor’s decision.

Mr. Richardson’s withdrawal removes a candidate who had a hard-edged message of immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq, but tempered it with humorous television advertisements that emphasized his wide-ranging credentials in a clever and effective way.

In New Hampshire, Mr. Richardson gained less than five percent of the vote on Tuesday. In Iowa last Thursday, he came in with two percent of the caucus vote, despite having spent weeks campaigning in the state and flooding the airwaves with a series of commercials that portrayed him as a job seeker in front of a bored interviewer, unimpressed with his extensive résumé.

For a while, Mr. Richardson was in double-digit territory in Iowa, but that lead diminished as the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton gained strength. It is unclear whether Richardson supporters will gravitate to Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton.

He needed to meet with "advisers" to figure out that he wasn't going anywhere? The truth is that most of his supporters (at least three of the five) will go to Obama since what Richardson mostly had going for him was the fact that he wasn't Hillary.