Smith leaves GOP, becomes a Democrat
Oso Ridge resident says he plans to run against Rainaldi

Edward L. Smith Sr. is embarking as a Democrat to become a New Mexico state senator in District 4 this coming year. Smith ran as a Republican in 2006. [Photo by Daniel Zollinger/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff writer

GALLUP — If State Sen. Lidio Rainaldi should expect anything from the 2008 race, should he choose to run again, it’s a determined opponent.

“If I do something, I do it to win,” said Edward Smith Sr., who has announced his plans to run for Rainaldi’s District 4 seat in 2008, more than a year ahead of the general election. “If I play you tennis, I’m not going to go out there just to run around. I’m going to try to whoop you.”

The sprightly 80-year-old, who could knock a decade or two off his age by his appearance, attributes his vigor to a regimen of morning exercise. Though 20 years removed from his National Guard days, he still introduces himself as “Colonel Smith” with bright eyes and a hardy handshake.

The Oso Ridge resident lost his first bid for public office, for the House of Representatives’ District 6 seat in 2006, as a Republican. Having switched parties only weeks ago, he plans on meeting Rainaldi next year in the Democratic primaries. It could prove a tough fight for an ex-Republican, facing an established Democrat in a deeply Democratic district. But if there’s anything Smith, who is black, knows, it’s defying expectations.

“All of this is part of a pain problem,” Smith said, tapping on a copy of his impressive resume, laying out a life’s worth of experience as a military man and a teaching her and abroad and, later, as the owner of a computer consulting business. “They say you can’t do it because nobody has done those things.”

Born in Philadelphia just before the Great Depression arrived, Smith had celebrated only one birthday when his parents divorced. Moving to North Carolina to live on his grandparents’ farm, he grew up under an “apartheid system” where “they felt you don’t have the ability or the intelligence to do well in life.”

After surviving the Korean War in the U.S. Army, Smith returned to an America where little had changed for a black man. He divorced his first wife and watched his car insurance company cancel his policy. Going off the company’s statistics, he recalled, “they said you drank, you smoked and you partied when you divorced.”

“I didn’t do any of that,” Smith said, still a little incredulous at the slight. “So here I am coming back from a war where I was defending the freedoms of this country with my life and I’m still experiencing these things.”

But Smith persevered. After a few years supervising an ordinance depot in Japan and working on a weapons program at White Sands Missile Range, he retired from active duty and moved around as a high school teacher and college councilor, then taught data processing in Liberia for the Peace Corps in the early 1980s between stints as a computer consultant. Smith finally moved back to New Mexico, to Albuquerque, to found the Smith Technology Corporation, the first African American-owned engineering company, he claims, “west of the Mississippi.”

He credits President Richard Nixon for the opportunity, and for making him a Republican.

“Nixon started the Small Business Administration,” he said. “That’s how I got my start.”

Ronald Reagan’s straight talk, said Smith, who believes the former president’s professed ignorance of the Iran-Contra Affair, kept him loyal. It’s George Bush Sr.’s perceived mistreatment of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega that started giving Smith second thoughts about his party affiliation, and Bush Jr.’s prosecution of the Iraq War that finally convinced him to switch.

Smith said he was on board with some of Bush’s official reasons for the invasion — removing Saddam Hussein from power, helping the Iraqi people establish a representative government. But after 4 1/2 years and little progress to show, he’s had enough. Like most Washington Democrats, he wants America to pull out immediately.

But Smith concedes that his decision to change parties has more than a little to do with his lifelong passion for winning. Republican senators are a rare sight in the New Mexico Legislature. In Rainaldi, he’ll be facing a two-term incumbent with deep ties to the area. But Smith believes his political opponent has grown complacent during the past eight years and plans to unseat him simply “by working harder.”

He doesn’t offer many details, but speaks of making economic development the focus of his campaign. By aggressively pursuing contacts with companies’ procurement managers, he said, the area could attract more high-tech industry. He also talks of surveying the community for the public’s thoughts on development.

“That’s how you get started, you need to bring people to the table,” he said.

Smith is currently a member of the Grants-Cibola County Chamber of Commerce and president of the Grants-Milan chapter of Rotary International.