President-elect Barack Obama announced Wednesday that he has tapped New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson as his commerce secretary, adding another former rival to his cabinet.
Obama, who will be inaugurated as president on January 20th, also stressed the need to fashion a plan to help bolster the economy.
Richardson ran against Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination and joins New York Senator Hillary Clinton as former primary opponents of the president-elect that have been slated for a top position in the new administration.
Earlier this week, Obama, who has been announcing his cabinet picks in a series of press conferences over the past couple weeks, revealed that he had chosen Clinton as his secretary of state.
Obama also made brief comments about about the urgency to craft a plan to help bolster the economy.
"With each passing day, the work our team has begun, developing plans to revive our economy, becomes more urgent," the president-elect said.
He pointed out that an official body declared earlier this week that the U.S. has been in a recession since December of last year and that recent data has shown manufacturing output at a 26-year low. He called these statistics "two stark reminders of the magnitude of the challenges we face."
Richardson has served as governor of New Mexico since 2003. Prior to that, he served as energy secretary in President Bill Clinton's cabinet. He has also served as ambassador to the United Nations and as a member of the House of Representatives.
"During his time in state government and Congress, and in two tours of duty in the cabinet, Bill has seen from just about every angle what makes our economy work and what keeps it from working better," Obama said in praise of his commerce s-designate.
Obama has said that he is looking to fill his administration with diverse opinions. Along with Clinton, the president-elect also announced earlier this week that he was retaining the current Secretary of State, Robert Gates, to continue in that role into the next administration.
The string of cabinet announcements began early last week, when Timothy Geithner, the current president of the New York Federal Reserve, was tapped as the next treasury secretary. Geithner, who served in the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton, has worked closely with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in fighting the current financial crisis.
Speaking at the press conference, Richardson argued that Obama was not building a "team of rivals," a term brought into the popular imagination by Doris Kearns Goodwin's book about Abraham Lincoln's cabinet. The New Mexico Governor said he preferred to think of Obama, Clinton and himself as "competitors" not rivals.
Richardson, who made some of his remarks at the press conference in Spanish, added that the country must build trade relations "not with rivalry, but instead with partnership and innovation and hard work."
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