Last week, Pres. Barack Obama’s reelection campaign announced it’s almost doubling the size of field offices in the state. That seemed like an odd investment for a campaign that, according to the polls, has a secure lead over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in New Mexico.

It was Oct. 14, 2011, and Keith Gardner was tired.
As Gov. Susana Martinez’ chief of staff, Gardner is arguably the second most powerful person in state government.

A few weeks ago, Sonia Montoya, 26, landed a job interview at Garcia Nissan Santa Fe, off St. Michael’s Drive. A single mother of an active eight-year-old boy, Montoya had made it to the interview phase for an administrative assistant position at the car dealership. Her résumé boasts three similar positions, she says, and Montoya felt qualified for the work.

Jon Ross Barrie looks the part of a patriot. In images on his campaign website, Barrie sports an American flag tie and, for good measure, an American flag lapel pin. From the website, a simple WordPress template, Barrie broadcasts his campaign platform for the US Senate. In a YouTube video, the bespectacled Vietnam veteran says he’s a “citizen activist” who is “kind of like the founding fathers.”

On Dec. 15, 2011, Pat Rogers, the prominent Modrall Sperling lawyer and lobbyist, sent an email to the private account of Gov. Susana Martinez’ chief of staff, Keith Gardner, thanking Gardner for agreeing to set up a meeting with Martinez on behalf of one of his firm’s clients.

Flies buzzed around the heads of attendees seated on the patio of Socorro’s Capitol Bar, a brick saloon near the town’s plaza where, at the turn of the 20th century, the bar’s one-time owner, Justice of the Peace Amos Green, held court and jailed the guilty. More than 100 years later, US Senate candidate Martin Heinrich was on trial by a Democratic base at a quick meet-and-greet in a county where more than 75 percent of voters pulled the lever for Democratic US Sen. Jeff Bingaman in 2006. It was a fundraiser attended by a few dozen of the Democratic faithful. Suggested donation: $25.

Jefferson Byrd, the Republican candidate hoping to dethrone incumbent Democrat Ben Ray Luján from his US House seat, is going to light up like a prairie fire.

More than 27,000 New Mexicans work for state government, according to the state’s sunshine portal. Those state employees are required to give a portion of their paychecks to a pension fund run by the Public Employees Retirement Association. When an employee retires, the pension is repaid.

In 1991, at the suggestion of his wife Peaches, Eddie Gilbert moved to Santa Fe. A man once labeled as the boy-wonder of Wall Street, Gilbert had served two separate prison terms for financial crimes. But he found a less lawless life here, having established the BGK Group, which became the largest holder of commercial real estate in New Mexico. The twice-befallen financier reinvented himself in Santa Fe—the capital city of a state an 1876 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial called “the tag end of all that is objectionable in an imperfect civilization.”

Can the electromagnetic fields associated with cell phones cause physical pain and memory problems? Or is Arthur Firstenberg’s claim that cell phones have caused him nausea, vertigo, diarrhea, insomnia and a host of other ailments merely the baseless complaint of a hypochondriac?