Jan. 13—A scan of New Mexico attorneys general over the past half-century reveals an unpredictable Scrabble of political fortune.

And political fortune — rather, political future — is one of the reasons people run for the office in the first place.

Played correctly, attorney general is the ultimate launchpad job. Only New Mexico’s governor has a bigger bully pulpit, though it’s one that doesn’t come with much protective coating, given media critics and a Legislature of 112 men and women, all of whom think they’d be better at the position than the office’s occupant.

AG? You’ve gotta win cases, sure. But mostly, you’ve gotta win hearts and minds — trumpeting the victories and minimizing the losses. Do that well enough, often enough, and you end up in 60-point newspaper headlines and on the “A” block of the 6 p.m. news.

Stack those clips high enough, and anything’s possible.

Tom Udall and Jeff Bingaman got elected to Congress after running the Attorney General’s Office. Toney Anaya became governor.

But it doesn’t always work that way in New Mexico. Hal Stratton, the only Republican to have the post in the past nine decades, saw his path forward blocked, more by party than performance. Paul Bardacke, probably the best pure lawyer of the bunch and the guy for whom the AG complex on Galisteo Street is named, couldn’t win the Democratic nomination for governor. Gary King and Patricia Madrid saw their political careers end with failed November runs for governor and the U.S. House, respectively.

Hector Balderas is a college president in Española.

With political past and future all around, what to make of Raúl Torrez, who as of last week no longer heads the Attorney General’s Office but the — drum roll optional — New Mexico Department of Justice?

After 16 years of circumspect, sometimes odd leadership in AG’s office, Torrez is a throwback to the stereotype of what people used to think an attorney general did. Rare is the week he’s not announcing a new initiative, an investigation, a push, a plan.

It’s a case against the Facebook guys at Meta. Or an investigation of disciplinary practices in the Gallup-McKinley County school system. Or an intervention in the endless Yazzie/Martinez education-funding case. An agreement with Deutsche Bank to fight human trafficking. The list goes on.

Even Wednesday’s announcement about the name change came with a nod to the big picture. At one point, Torrez earnestly told an audience of mostly friends and staffers that despite being a Democrat, his favorite president was a Republican, Abraham Lincoln. He even quoted snippets of Lincoln’s inaugural address in 1861, a time when a nation headed toward an apocalyptic Civil War was fragmented, set against itself.

Torrez, 47, said he hears those echoes as we gird for what promises to be an ungodly election season in a country where there’s a gun on every corner but not a chicken in every pot; an era when American politicians and even poll workers can, incredibly, be threatened. But it’s more than that. He noted he devised the name change in hopes of telling the public a Department of Justice is really their court — actually, their investigator and prosecutor — of last resort, regardless of whether the issue is PFAS or CYFD or any of the other acronyms or maladies that bedevil daily lives.

“I don’t want to imply that my predecessors aren’t interested in those things or didn’t do those things,” he said, a few moments after unveiling the Department of Justice’s new logo. “But what I’m trying to do is communicate to the general public. If they don’t know what we do, this is what we’re doing.”

Earlier in his career, Torrez worked for the U.S. attorney’s office. It’s clear the things he saw and learned there have marked the way he goes about the state job. He also spent years in the meat grinder of the Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office, coming to the top post just as Albuquerque’s violence and drug problems were reaching their awful apex. He knows the drill as it applies to most of the serious crime that afflicts New Mexico.

The other stuff — degrees from Harvard, the London School of Economics, Stanford — has a very nice sheen. If you’re looking at the future of the Democratic Party (and believe me, every Democrat under the age of 60 is always looking at the future of the Democratic Party in New Mexico), he’s going to be in the conversation for some time.

But when you unveil a new name for an old agency, and pop the top on lofty goals while invoking the name of Lincoln, maybe the governor isn’t the only one who will be carefully scrutinized. Torrez gets to catapult legal stones at Goliaths like Meta. Whether he can bring them down is a completely different matter.

So Raúl Torrez’s standing, tomorrow, next Thursday and 1,000 days from now, is going to be very, very interesting — particularly in a party in which there’s plenty of depth and no shortage of ambition.

Bingaman, Anaya, Udall? Or King, Madrid, Balderas?

We’ll see where the Scrabble tiles shake out.

Phill Casaus is editor of The New Mexican.