Ann’s Plans
Johnson, Bentsen, Connally, Bush,Perot … Will Ann Richards be the next Texan to run for president?
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Her popularity is rooted not in her accomplishments as governor (her legislative agenda has been limited to a few high-profile issues, such as the lottery and taking on insurance compa-nies and polluters) but in her style and the specifics of who she is: a 58-year-old woman, a mother, a former schoolteacher, a former county commissioner, and a survivor of divorce and alcoholism. Richards has evolved into a matriarchal figure—a powerful woman, to be sure, but one whose power seems to be more collegial than controlling. She is the modern incarnation of the tough prairie earth mother. Her style is as effective with hard-bitten inside-the-Capitol types as it is with the public at large. “One night she called a group of us over to the mansion,” recalled a business lobbyist, “served us piping-hot cornbread, and talked to us like family for a couple of hours about school finance. I don’t always agree with her, but she reminds me of the way everybody in rural Texas used to be. They worked harder and produced more than anybody else.”
To understand Richards’ style, you have to start with her hair. You know Richards is a star because of the way people react when she walks into a room. They turn and stare … at her hair. They sometimes gasp for breath, point, and giggle. It is hard and white and high, and at first glance it looks hilariously bouffant—swept off her face in a helmet of silver coils. But as Richards’ popularity has grown, her hair has come to be a symbol for her political personality: solid, serious, stable, and reassuring, because it doesn’t change with the times. Although Republican critics like the party’s state chairman, Fred Meyer, keep trying to portray her as a shrill feminist liberal, they can’t quite keep her in that ideological box because her hairstyle—washed, curled, teased, and sprayed—is straight out of the fifties, the last era of good feeling in America. Her hair makes her a permanent member of the carhop generation, a throwback to small-town values, which is why she appeals to both men and women.
So does her sense of humor. Richards stands out because she’s one of the few politicians around who can make us laugh at ourselves. Remember the joke that made her famous? “Poor George,” she said in her 1988 Democratic convention speech, “he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Even though her joke stung, it wasn’t mean-spirited, and after the election Bush even gave her a pin of a silver foot. Four years later, her sense of humor seems almost nostalgic compared with today’s po-litical campaigns, which start in the gutter and get worse. But Richards continues to poke fun—and poke it at everyone. In her speech to congressional Democrats, she skewered George Bush’s economic recovery plan (“a Brylcreem agenda—a little dab’ll do ya”), but she didn’t let the Democrats off the hook either. She chastised them for clinging to the status quo and for refusing to talk about serious issues in plain and simple language. “Tell it so my 83-year-old mama in Waco can understand it,” she lectured. When she addressed the Gridiron Club, she took one look at the black-tie crowd of Washington insiders and said, “So this is what y’all do up here on Saturday nights. I don’t know whyyyyy anyone would think you’re out of touch.” It was the kind of snappy populist line Perot could have used—except it would have seemed mean if he had said it. For all his popularity, Perot can be an ice-water-in-the-veins sort of guy. The only thing frozen about Richards is her hair.
But Richards can be tough too. “She can play hardball with the best of ’em,” said one male business lobbyist, who described an evening during the legislative session when Richards asked business lobbyists straight out if they were trying to kill her hazardous waste bill. “Oh, no,” said the lobbyists, forced to backpedal. “You boys get out of here,” Richards told them. “We’re gonna write this bill, and if you stay, you’re gonna make an enemy out of me. Believe me, you don’t want to do that.” They left.
Richards does not hesitate to use the prestige of her office—she knows how legislators crave an invitation to the mansion for lunch—but unlike her immediate predecessors, Bill Clements and Mark White, she doesn’t get caught up in ceremonial trappings. She is as likely to serve cornbread or coffee herself as to ask a servant to do it. “I view being governor as a job, not an office,” she says vehemently. But her style isn’t gooey or sentimental. It’s hard to imagine Ann Richards drawing happy faces beside her autograph, as is the custom of Pat Schroeder.
The result is she has managed to serve almost a year and a half without accumulating any serious political liabilities or resolute enemies. She even appeals to many Republicans, especially those who favor abortion rights. Last winter a small group of eight wealthy Texans gathered for a dinner party in an exclusive neighborhood in Palm Springs, California. All had voted for Clayton Williams for governor in 1990. When the conversation turned to the 1996 presidential race, everyone at the table said that if Richards is a candidate, they will vote for her.
Besides such bipartisan support, she enjoys immunity in the various political wars within her own gender as well. Both sides in the war between working women and homemakers use her as proof that their particular choice is the right one. Full-time homemakers like her because when Richards’ four children were young, she stayed home with her kids and cleaned, sewed, and cooked. Mothers with full-time jobs see Richards as an advocate and role model, someone who started out a schoolteacher and inched her way forward. A few days after Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate defense of her own legal career—“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas”—Richards met with statewide editorial writers in her office. As she personally poured the coffee and served the fresh-baked cookies, the comparison between her and Hillary Clinton was stark: In Richards’ hands, cookies were proof of self-assurance.
Richards has managed to avoid the clichés that are constantly applied to women politicians, even by themselves. When USA Today surveyed the 31 female members of Congress on differences between women and men in Congress, some of the answers were downright hackneyed. “Women will work harder for peace,” said Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur, adding, “Women think horizontally. Men think vertically.” This is another version of the old saw that women are more intuitive and men are more logical, a stereotype that manages to insult both genders. Others said women care more and work harder, especially about family issues. Constance Morella, a Republican from Maryland, blatantly claimed intellectual superiority: “I think women understand all issues, certainly most issues, better than men.”
Richards would never say anything that impolitic. The one stereotype that might apply to her is that she has been more inclusive than the males who preceded her. More than half of Richards appointments have been women and minorities, and she has also avoided alienating potentially hostile groups, such as Republicans and men. Whatever she may believe privately about the differences between male and female politicians, she doesn’t say anything publicly that might create a gender gap for herself. In explaining to the Smith College graduates how being a woman affects her politically, Richards ventured only as far as the safe ground that women bring a different kind of experience to the table. “When I am part of a meeting and the subject is comparable worth or local government or the public schools,” she said, “the nature of the discussion changes because I am a woman, a former county commissioner, a former schoolteacher… . When you add someone whose understanding is not merely intellectual but instinctive, the whole equation changes.”
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