People sometimes like to argue that gender has no impact on how candidates approach women’s issues, and that all the Democrats are equally good and knowledgeable on reproductive rights topics. I present to you Bill Richardson, as described by Mark Kleiman, at the California Democratic Party 2007 Convention over the weekend:

Richardson…just doesn’t seem very smart, or very thoughtful. Having blundered last week by saying Whizzer White would be his model chief justice, a reporter asks him how he can reconcile that with his strong pro-choice position when White wrote the dissent in Roe v. Wade. Richardson says, “White was in the 60s. Wasn’t Roe v. Wade in the 80s?”

Not knowing when one of the most controversial court cases in the past half century was decided and who wrote the opinions in it is the domestic policy equivalent of a presidential candidate not being able to name the president of Pakistan or Iran.

–Crossposted from Tapped.