The Daughter Also Rises
The Bush-Richards wars in Texas were supposed to have ended ten years ago—and we all know who won. But with Ann's daughter, Cecile, overseeing the most well-funded effort to unseat a presidential incumbent in history, any talk of a cease-fire is officially over.
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Richards's PowerPoint presentation now displays a closely guarded secret: the coalition's city-by-city, group-by-group strategy for how Dem-ocrats can get the votes they need to win Ohio, a state Al Gore lost last time by 165,000 votes. Part of the key to success, she says, is to turn out the black vote; that is what several of those in attendance today will be doing. "Ohio is it," she says. "It is the election this year." She closes her presentation with a computer graphic showing the results of an AFL-CIO study of direct-mail solicitations that potential Democratic voters received in 2000. "We have always done good work on the progressive side," Richards explains to the darkened room. "But we have always done it in a disorganized fashion." On the screen appear, in a cascading sequence, several dozen pieces of mail from different liberal groups that were sent to individual voters in the days before the election. It is a breathtaking demonstration of wasted and duplicated effort that Richards vows will not happen again. "The Republicans have a three-to-one financial advantage," she says. "We need to make every dollar count."
CECILE RICHARDS IS THE PRODUCT of a household even more politically charged than the one George W. Bush was raised in. "Our four kids grew up in an atmosphere where you could not eat on the dining room table because it was always full of political mailings," says Cecile's mother, Ann. "When they were really small, they could fold letters and stuff them into envelopes and seal them. As they progressed in their abilities, they learned how to put a stamp on them and sort them out by precinct." While Ann labored in electoral politics and was active in the campaigns of Sarah Weddington, Gonzalo Barrientos, Wilhelmina Delco, and others (she was not elected to public office until she won the Travis County commissioner's seat, in 1976), Cecile's father, David Richards, was busy launching a career as one of the most active labor-union lawyers in Texas. He was even more radical, more partisan than Ann. "We represented every union in the South," he says. "Teamsters and garment workers, plumbers and pipe fitters." For entertainment, the family would often sit around in the evening singing old union songs like "Joe Hill." Says Cecile: "I grew up in a very political family. Other families did bowling. We did politics." The first dance Cecile ever attended—at the age of nine—was an event at a VFW hall in Mission, where Chicano farm workers were kicking off a protest march on the state capitol. The effect of the family's activism on the Richardses' eldest child was immediate and profound. As a ten-year-old she organized the first recycling station in their neighborhood. At twelve she was sent home from school for wearing an armband to protest the Vietnam War.
When the family moved to Austin from Dallas, in 1969, the Richardses found themselves in the midst of that city's social and political upheavals. They became prominent players in both, and as a teenager, Cecile hung out at places like the Armadillo World Headquarters. She recalls one evening when Ann and David were hosting an anti-war rally at their home in West Lake Hills. The music was loud, the police showed up, and in the marshal's report to the city council, he said he had been surrounded, as David wrote in his memoir, Once Upon a Time in Texas, "by a bunch of stoned hippies who kept screaming 'Off the pig.'"
After graduating from Brown, in 1980, Cecile embarked on a career in the labor movement, taking a succession of union jobs, most of which involved recruiting new members. Her first was in the Rio Grande Valley, organizing garment workers; later she worked with hotel workers in New Orleans and janitors in Los Angeles. In 1982 she met her husband, Kirk Adams, who was also a labor organizer and who is now the chief of staff of the Service Employees International Union, the largest union in America. The couple had three children, who are now seventeen and thirteen (twins). In 1990 the family moved to Austin so Cecile and Kirk could work in her mother's campaign.
After Ann's defeat in 1994—a crushing and unexpected blow—Cecile founded a grassroots organization called the Texas Freedom Network. The idea was to oppose the influence of conservative Christians in Texas politics, particularly in the election of school boards. It was a time when conservatives were making huge gains, both in state and national politics. Though no comparable organization existed then in any other state, Cecile plunged ahead, logging many hours driving across the state to make speeches. "By the time she left, three years later, we had eight thousand or nine thousand members," says Samantha Smoot, who took over as executive director in 1998. "That is remarkable. It all started as a file box of names in Cecile's kitchen and grew to many thousands of people." It was a difficult fight against well-funded opponents, who often branded her un-Christian, anti-God, and anti-family. To help counter some of those charges, she recruited like-minded ministers into a political advocacy group called the Texas Faith Network, which now has five hundred members. In 1998 she briefly considered running for state Democratic party chair, a position that was thought to be hers if she wanted it. By now she had clearly moved out of her mother's shadow, though she had benefited from the contact. "Her mother being governor opened a whole lot of doors and gave her access to a lot of people and ideas," says close friend Patti Everitt. Says Ann of the rigors of having a famous mother: "She grew up with that. She handles it beautifully and gracefully and kindly with me. But I am also sure there are days when she is absolutely sick of it."
Instead of pursuing the electoral career many Texas Democrats wanted her to pursue, Cecile moved with Kirk to Washington, where he had taken a job as organizing director for the AFL-CIO. She soon went to work running the Turner Foundation for Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. Her job was, as she says, "to help build the infrastructure of the choice movement in America." She worked closely with organizations like Planned Parenthood and distributed grant money around the country. Though she had gone to Washington with no greater goal than to take her children to museums and galleries and volunteer at their schools, her career was quickly taking a new, decidedly national turn. In 2002 she became deputy chief of staff for Democrat Nancy Pelosi, of California, who had just become minority whip in Congress and was about to become minority leader. Eighteen months later, in July 2003, now with deep roots in the national Democratic party and the progressive movement, she left that job to become president of America Votes.
THAT SUMMER RICHARDS AND A handful of other Democratic heavyweights came together informally to concoct what would become the America Votes effort. They were driven primarily by the campaign-finance reforms of 2002, which shut off the unregulated giving to parties but allowed donors to give unlimited amounts to interest groups as long as those groups did not coordinate or communicate with candidates or their parties and did not run ads specifically advocating the election or defeat of a candidate. They believed Republicans were going to raise huge amounts of hard money, at least twice what Democrats could raise. The core of the strategy was to set up 527's that could raise money and act independently of the Democratic party.
The founders of America Votes included some of the Democratic party's most experienced hands, all of whom would help run the operation: Harold Ickes, a former deputy White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, who runs the Media Fund; Steve Rosenthal, a former AFL-CIO political director, now the CEO of America Coming Together; Ellen Malcolm, the president of both America Coming Together and Emily's List, the nation's largest political action committee; Service Employees Union president Andrew Stern; and Jim Jordan, formerly John Kerry's campaign manager, who now heads up research for the group. Richards was given the task of making all of that unwieldy and disparate machinery work together. "We wanted to find a way to bring progressive groups together for the election. So we created America Votes," says Malcolm. "It was a monster coalition, and we universally agreed that Cecile was the best person to coordinate it."
The new organization, fueled by huge personal donations from the likes of billionaire activist George Soros, yielded immediate dividends. The 527's—including the Media Fund and the MoveOn.org Voter Fund—allowed Kerry's message to stay on the airwaves in March while his campaign scrambled to refill its coffers. That initiative, in fact, led to the Democrats' principal strategic victory in a money race that Republicans are winning decisively. The GOP, which had no such strategy, believed that either the Supreme Court or the Federal Election Commission or both would declare such soft money illegal and thus paralyze the Democrats' ability to raise and deploy it through the 527's. That never happened. "The Democrats figured it out early and were very smart to pursue it and have a tremendous lead over Republicans in that sort of money," says Jim Francis, one of Bush's largest fundraisers. "Republicans are now trying to set these up but are at a disadvantage because they did not do anything until recently."
The GOP, it must be noted, is not without its outside funding sources. In 2000, for example, the pharmaceutical industry raised and spent $30 million of 527 money to help elect Bush. And it is interesting to note the somewhat hypocritical positions of both parties: Democrats, who have long howled about the evils of soft money, became the leading proponents of the 527's, the biggest loophole in the McCain-Feingold laws meant to stop soft money; Republicans, who have traditionally favored few or no restrictions on campaign contributions but seeing that the McCain-Feingold laws gave Democrats an advantage, sought to enforce the restrictions.
Meanwhile, Richards' shadow party rolls forward, working in the trenches of highly contested states like New Mexico and Florida and Minnesota. She is on the road most of the time, sometimes averaging four states a week, meeting with the far-flung field operatives of her coalition, trying to get the NAACP to do one thing and the teachers union to do another. One campaign worker called it "herding cats." With all the effort, there is still no guaranteeing that it will work, as was proved by Tony Sanchez's campaign for Texas governor in 2002, which mounted one of the largest door-to-door efforts in history only to lose by eighteen points.
Win or lose, there are a lot of Texas Democrats who are wondering if Richards has any plans to run for office in Texas. They tried to persuade her to run for land commissioner in 2002—one poll of Democrats had her ahead of potential rivals—but she declined. "It's always in the back of my mind," she says. "Either because of the age of my kids or for other reasons, there hasn't been a time when it has made perfect sense. But I know I will definitely be back in Texas at some point. I am just so grateful to be a Texan and to be from there." Of course, if she ever ran for governor and won, she would be the leader of a state where many members of the Bush family reside, including George and Barbara, George W. and Laura, and an assortment of grandchildren. That's all very hypothetical, and very far away, but one can imagine the Bushes fighting a Richards candidacy every step of the way. Think of it as Bush-Richards IV.
With reporting by Michael Hardy
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