Early on, it looks like Hillary Clinton's status as front-runner would only get a serious challenge from Barack Obama, the single-term Senator that has the media abuzz with delight. Obama looks to be the only candidate that can draw from the left and center in the Democratic Party enough to threaten HIllarys chances in the primary. However, the advent of Bill Richardson's candidacy may pose much more difficult problems for Hillary, if Richardson chooses to play hardball in the primaries:

Richardson spent 15 years in Congress before being named U.S. ambassador to the United Nations by President Bill Clinton in 1997. A year later he was appointed energy secretary. Richardson returned to elected office in 2002, winning the gubernatorial race. Last fall he cruised to a second term with 69 percent of the vote.

Throughout his career in public life, Richardson has also served as a roving diplomat, dispatched to defuse crises in hot spots including North Korea and Iraq. He spent several days in Sudan last week before making his presidential intentions known. ...

Regardless of the strength of his résumé, Richardson faces a rocky path to the nomination. In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 1 percent of Democratic voters said they would support Richardson in a primary. By contrast, Clinton took 41 percent, Obama 17 percent and Edwards 11 percent.

As an insider in the final term of the Clinton presidency, Richardson certainly has his own perspective as to how the Clintons ran the White House. It has long been rumored that Hillary was a complicating factor in administration politics, and Richardson would have been in a position to know.

Will he start telling stories out of school about Hillary and her actions during those years? Richardson isn't known as a hardball politician despite his prowess on the baseball field in his youth, but he has to know that running against Hillary will require that kind of mindset. So far, he is the only Clinton White House figure running for President, and probably the only one other than Al Gore with the resumé to do it.

Even the fact of his candidacy makes a case for his readiness to dish on Hillary. He's just young enough (60) to have waited for 2012 or 2016 to avoid going against Hillary, and yet he chose to run against his former boss' spouse. That indicates that Richardson doesn't feel especially loyal to either HIllary or Bill, and hints that some fireworks may await us on the primary trail. If so, Richardson may represent the biggest threat to Hillary for the nomination, regardless of whether Richardson ever cracks into the top tier of candidates.

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