by Mike Smith
Daily Lobo
In 1998, Kevin Cole, of Carlsbad, New Mexico set a new world record for the farthest spaghetti nasal ejection, sending 7 1/2 inches of noodle rocketing from his nose in a single blow.
And in 2002, charity workers from Albuquerque set a record for the world's largest taco. The soft-shelled taco weighed over 1,600 pounds, measured almost 20 feet long, and took at least 25 people to construct.
So, there's that.
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New Mexicans can be a pretty odd lot, with unusual hopes, goals and accomplishments, but it seems we may be represented by one of our own: In 2002, in Albuquerque, Governor Bill Richardson set the world record for most handshakes by a politician in an eight-hour period, shaking the hands of 13,392 potential voters.
William Blaine "Bill" Richardson III, the son of a Mexican mother and a naturalized American father, became the first Hispanic governor of an American state. Since 1982, he has served as a congressman, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Secretary of Energy, and governor of New Mexico, and he is campaigning to be elected president in 2008.
His supporters tout him as a Democratic candidate who could actually win - a Hispanic candidate who has repeatedly been ranked among the country's most fiscally responsible Democratic governors, a man who could attract much-needed swing votes with his support of the death penalty and the right to bear arms. They also point out his successful diplomatic efforts to release American prisoners in Iraq and Darfur that have earned him four separate nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize and caused Larry Sabato of Virginia's Center for Politics to label him "the only governor with a foreign policy."
Richardson's detractors point out his negligence to prevent, in 1998, nuclear secrets from being stolen from Los Alamos National Laboratory when he was Secretary of Energy, and his six-figure investments in a Texas oil company that don't quite jive with his stance on the environment.
However, we have to admit the guy can shake hands.
Even as early as 1980, during his first run for congress, Richardson made shaking hands and personal contact a constant part of his approach to campaigning. He set a goal to never let a day go by without shaking at least 1,000 hands.
"Then it was 2,000," wrote Thomas J. Cole in a January 28, 2007 Albuquerque Journal article. "He even carried a counter for a while to track his success at ballgames, parades, office buildings-just about anywhere he could find warm bodies."
Around that time he set his first world handshaking record, shaking 8,871 hands in one day and making his way into the Guinness Book of World Records.
"The first time I met him, he was campaigning in Virginia to help elect Tim Kaine governor," wrote Ian Samuel, a contributing writer for the Bill Richardson Blog, in a recent e-mail. "He had read my blog a bit, and reached out to shake my hand...after which, he also reached out and (as we were shaking hands), tousled my hair and sort of gave me a noogie! Had anyone else done it, it might have been annoying. But he was just such a nice guy that I couldn't help but grin."
"When you're shaking hands, don't give a fish handshake, but don't crush their fingers either," Richardson wrote in Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life. "You should take someone by the hand and by the elbow. Then look in their eye and count one, two, three. You can talk to them, sure, but hold on for three beats and look them in the eye for all that time. This way, you'll establish a connection."
On September 14, 2002, the New Mexico State Fair was in full swing. That evening, the Lobos played the Baylor Bears at University Stadium. Lobo fans gathered afterward in the parking lot to drink and celebrate. At both of these events, Bill Richardson roamed through the crowds, his right hand extended, a Guinness Book official and a Richardson staffer following behind him with a clicker. At the time, Richardson was seven weeks away from New Mexico's gubernatorial election.
"The reason I did this was to show we have a grass-roots campaign and that politics can be fun," Richardson told the press at that time. "Politics is people."
That day, Richardson shook 13,392 hands, the most handshakes by a politician in eight hours, a record that still stands and that helped land him into both Ripley's Believe It Or Not! and the Guinness Book.
That night, Richardson's right hand was so stiff and sore, that he shoved it into a bucket of ice as soon as his handshaking marathon was over.
Richardson's critics sometimes dismiss this record as simply publicity hounding, but they can't dismiss the 13,392 hands shaken in a mere eight hours. That's a feat. That's 1,674 handshakes every hour, 27.9 handshakes every minute, one handshake every 2.15 seconds.
Mike Smith is a UNM history student and the author of Towns of the Sandia Mountains. Check out his article about Al Capone's Jemez Mountain hideout in the July issue of New Mexico Magazine, and e-mail him with suggestions for future columns at AntarcticSuburbs@yahoo.com.
