a good lady
a good politician


Ann Richards, Ex-Governor of Texas, Dies at 73

By RICK LYMAN
Published: September 14, 2006
Ann W. Richards, the silver-haired Texas activist who galvanized the 1988 Democratic National Convention with her tart keynote speech and was the state’s 45th governor until upset in 1994 by an underestimated challenger named George W. Bush, died Wednesday at her home in Austin. She was 73.

Ann Richards’s Keynote Address to the 1988 Democratic National ConventionMs. Richard died, surrounded by her four children, of complications from the esophageal cancer, the Associated Press reported.

Ms. Richards was the most recent and one of the most effective in a long-line of Lone Star State progressives who vied for control of Texas in the days when it was largely a one-party Democratic enclave, a champion of civil rights, gay rights and feminism. Her defeat by the future president was one of the chief markers of the end of generations of Democratic dominance in Texas.

So cemented was her celebrity on the national stage, however, that she appeared in national advertising campaigns, including one for snack chips, and was a lawyer and lobbyist for Public strategies and Verner, Lipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand.

“Poor George, he can’t help it,” Ms. Richards said at the Democratic convention in 1988, speaking about the current president’s father, former President George Bush. “He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Her acidic, plain-spoken keynote address was one of the year’s political highlights and catapulted the one-term Texas governor into a national figure.

“We’re gonna tell how the cow ate the cabbage,” she said, bringing the great tradition of vernacular Southern oratory to the national political stage in a way that transformed the mother of four into an revered icon of feminist activism.