Today's Must Read: MyDD Interviews Rep. Tom Udall

Jonathan Singer at the national blog MyDD has posted an excellent interview he conducted this weekend with Rep. Tom Udall. Udall formally kicked off his campaign for U.S. Senate in New Mexico last week during a 9-city tour of the state. Singer provides both a text transcript and an mp3 of his talk with Udall, which includes discussion of Udall's votes against the Iraq invasion and the Patriot Act, his reasons for running, his recent vote on the Los Alamos National Labs budget, how he intends to run his campaign and his positions on issues like health care and renewable energy that will be the core of his platform. You really should go read and/or listen to the whole thing, but here are a couple excerpts:

On Negative Campaigning:
Singer: Now this is a complete non sequitur, but we're seeing so far in the race - even before you got in the race - a negative campaign in the Democratic primary. A lot of primaries you don't see negative campaigning at all. But when you do see it, it tends to be towards the end of the campaign. Were you surprised by the mudslinging even before you made a decision to get in the race?

Udall: I believe that the American people and New Mexicans don't like nasty campaigns. And we've had some of my opponents get very nasty and say that they're going to run nasty campaigns. And my response has been I think you're going to see a very bad reaction from New Mexicans to this kind of campaigning. People don't like mudslinging. They don't like that. They don't like the feeling about it. They don't like the failure to have any positive vision.

What I'm going to try to offer is a positive vision for communities in New Mexico, talk about the things that we can really do working together. I've viewed my job in the House of Representatives as being empowering communities to fulfill their dreams and working with those communities on specific issues to see that they get things done. That's what people want out of public servants.

There are others out there that want to demean the whole process and demean the system. I find that a very sad commentary on our political life nowadays and I wish we could focus more on the positive. And in fact the best advice my father gave me was just to be positive and work hard, and the best will work out for you. And he just told me that recently.

Running for a Statewide Race:
Singer: Moving forward, of course you don't want to look too far ahead, but as someone who has run and won two successful statewide bids for Attorney General within New Mexico, how does that prepare you for the campaigning statewide? A lot of people think that maybe moving from the House to the Senate is more difficult, but you have statewide election experience. What did that teach you?

Udall: I served two terms as the state Attorney General. In my job I chose to travel widely in New Mexico. We had a state plane available to us, and so we would have some of my division directors... I would always make it known several weeks before we were traveling so that others in the office could do work in a variety of communities in New Mexico. And we'd take off very early in the morning and come back pretty late at night and get a lot of work done.

One thing I learned is that it's a big state. There's a lot of diversity. Even in a fairly fast plane it takes you an hour from the center of the state, the state capital of Santa Fe, it takes you an hour in almost any direction to get out to the far reaches of the state. In order to represent the state you have to travel a lot. It may be by train, it may be by car. But all of these communities are wonderful communities that are engaged in a variety of ways with the federal government in some cases. There are three military bases in New Mexico, two national laboratories. We have a diversity of other kinds of industry and businesses, many small businesses. We don't have many large Fortune 500 type of companies. We do have Intel, and Intel has been a major player in my Congressional district, and we have some wonderful people working there.

So what you end up learning is you learn the whole state, you understand the state, you understand what the needs are. And that helped me, in my eight years as Attorney General, understand what people want, and I'm going to step up to the plate and try to help them fulfill their dreams and empower them to work hard to fulfill their dreams.

If you're as enthusiastic about Rep. Udall's run as I am, head over to the Netroots for Tom Udall page at ActBlue and make a campaign contribution right now. You can also visit Udall's campaign website, which will be revamped soon, at https://www.udallforusall.com/.

To read our previous coverage of the 2008 Senate Race in New Mexico, visit our archive. If you haven't yet seen our video clips from Rep. Udall's formal announcement event at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque last Thursday, click here and here.