Ann Richards RIP

“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.”

Hardy Har Har. But the elder George beat Dukakis in the fall of that year.

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.

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. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/us/14richards.html?ex=1158897600&en=408a0e9bfa0492c2&ei=5065&partner=MYWAY

She was matronly, grandmotherly, and spoke with a down-home southern accent, but she was a liberal through and through. I believe she was successful because she did what so many Democrats do best - misrepresent themselves, making them palatable to an electorate with which they have nothing in common.