After confirmation hearings at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, Richardson’s prospects look good to fill Madeleine Albright’s shoes as U.N. ambassador. Observers who wonder how this beefy, disheveled congressman vaulted into the country’s most buttoned-down diplomatic post are missing the shrewdness behind his every move. The son of an elegant Mexican society matron and a banker from Massachusetts, Richardson grew up in Mexico City and attended schools outside Boston, including the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. “Remember, he’s been trained in this international business his whole life,” says Rogelio Novey, a Panamanian classmate and still a good friend. Many New Mexicans still hope that Richardson will come home after his U.N. job to run for senator or governor. But Washington friends think he may have other posts in mind: secretary of state, say, or even Al Gore’s running mate in 2000.

Relations between him and Albright could grow prickly. As U.N. ambassador, Albright had a reticent boss down in Washington, Warren Christopher. Richardson will not be so lucky. “She’s very controlling,” says one Washington insider who knows them both. “There could be sparks.” As the White House’s unofficial envoy to the world’s rogue regimes, Richardson has gotten used to flying off to the other side of the world and engaging in a little diplomatic freelancing. That will end once he gets the U.N. job. Richardson, who loves schmoozing journalists almost as much as he loves schmoozing dictators, could also prove tough competition for Albright as a media darling. Thanks to his fluent Spanish, he’s probably better liked in Latin America than she is.

Richardson also has a direct line to Clinton. “They both like to eat, hug and campaign,” says a friend of both Bills, Tony Podesta. Like Clinton, Richardson is a policy wonk who plows through weighty tomes of history for pleasure–he took biographies of Nelson Rockefeller and Winston Churchill to Mexico for Christmas vacation. Both men work like demons and ride their staffs just as hard (Richardson once knocked his receptionist’s lunch off her desk because he was on a diet and grumpy about it). But he’s not a smoothie like Clinton. “He looks like an unmade bed,” says New Mexico political commentator Fred McCaffrey. At the protocol-conscious United Nations, where diplomats parse their words by the millimeter, Richardson’s relaxed style may need some refinement. He’ll need to mind his p’s and q’s back in Washington, too.