At daybreak of both the hunting and the political campaigning seasons, Ann Richards heard that her opponent in the Texas governor's race, former first son George W. Bush, had shot a protected bird. She hoped it was a songbird, an Atticus Finch, but it turned out that Bush had shot a killdeer, which was almost better. In the Texas tongue and its own, a killdeer is a "killdee," unremarkable in appearance, antisocial by disposition and no great success as a bird. When her nest is threatened, a female killdee will fake having a broken wing and hop along the ground on her chestnut bottom, away from her young.
But what works for killdees doesn't work for politicians, Governor Richards declared. "You can't be something you're not," she said. "You can't get dressed up in a hunting jacket, borrow somebody's shotgun and head out into the field. You just can't do it. You'll kill the wrong bird ever' time."
Using a dove hunt to kick off a gubernatorial campaign was pure Texas and purely intentional. While she got off a couple of nice shots, both at the birds and at Bush, Richards was mostly firing in self-defense. This year, in Texas and across the South and the West, the Democrats are the doves and the Republicans are gleefully blasting away.
Time was, everyone in Texas was a Democrat, except philosophically. Four years ago, Richards would have lost large to a rich yahoo named Claytie Williams if he hadn't fallen on his own spurs while wiggling his ears for the cameras. I'm gonna "head her and hoof her and drag her through the dirt," he promised. At another point, the capricious Texas weather put Williams in mind of rape. "If it's inevitable," he said, "relax and enjoy it." Later, in a fit of Texas A&M nostalgia straight out of Larry L. King, Williams became teary-eyed over the border- town brothels he used to frequent "for service."
In terms of the electorate, none of this killed him dead. But then he refused to shake Richards's hand at a debate. Texas was appalled.
Silver foot. As a breach of good manners, his snub rivaled her snideness at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, which is where the rest of the country discovered Ann Richards. "Poor George," she said of Vice President Bush in her keynote address. "He can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth."
But her high moments nationally and locally don't necessarily coincide, and it's possible for someone to be the most recognizable -- even the most esteemed -- governor in the nation and still not get re-elected in Texas. In fact, she is running neck and neck with George W., who technically is not a junior (his father is George Herbert Walker Bush) but may wish he were. Richards refers to him as "George the Younger." Columnist and liberal gadfly Molly Ivins calls him "Shrub."
That man with the silver foot in his mouth has gone into the Fast Chicken George business, franchising his roots like a Kennedy but with a singular wrinkle. The specialty of the house this year is gubernatorial candidates: Jeb in Florida and George W. in Texas, to whom George H.W. relayed Petruchio's caution. "Kill her," he urged, "with kindness."
"What has the boy done?" the candidate says, asking his own question. "Well, I'm the businessman who came to town and, at the very minimum, kept the Rangers from moving out." Of course, being a baseball owner was a happier credential two months ago, before the industry committed Harry Caray. Bush's Rangers "won" the American League West by one game over the Oakland A's (albeit with a record that came out to 10 games under .500), but his fantasy of presiding at a World Series on the eve of the election died spectacularly. At least, as they say in Plano, it weren't football.
Two Texas governors on the trot -- Mark White (1982-86) and Bill Clements (1986-90) -- came to grief in football-related mishaps. White alienated the powerful Texas High School Coaches Association by endorsing a no-pass, no-play law that was insensitive to two facts of Texas life: The best players frequently are not the best scholars, and high school physics matters mostly because it helps explain how a 205-pound safety can bring down a tight end who weighs 245 pounds and runs the 40- yard dash in 4.8 seconds.
Then Clements, chairman of the Board of Governors at Southern Methodist University, blithely let it drop that he had been aware of booster payments to the athletes. When SMU was given the chair by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Clements was sitting in its lap looking fairly surprised.
Richards, by contrast, has made the odd and inevitable embarrassing appointment but otherwise has done nothing to warrant her mediocre standing in the polls. Statistically, crime is down, although nobody seems to believe it. Penitentiaries have proliferated like killdees. If it were an independent Western nation, Texas would be second only to the United States-minus- Texas in prison beds.
The Texas economy is brisk again, almost booming. Oil is back bubbling. Commercial high-rises, the unfinished symphonies of Dallas, are starting to locate tenants. Houston is diversifying. Even education is getting higher marks.
Only Richards's famous "pouf" is down, according to Texas Monthly, which stuck a dipstick into that silver coif and found her enthusiasm for politics, if not government, to be about a quart low. Allowing only that she was saddened and wisened by the meanness of the game, Richards denied she was "in a funk." Still, the magazine concluded: "The problem for Ann Richards is not so much Bush as it is herself."
The bald and the blond. "I get a lot of cracks about my hair," she says dismissively, "mostly from men who don't have any."
Her heart did not seem so light last summer when she introduced the Texas Girls State, a gaggle of wide-eyed teenagers sponsored by the American Legion Auxiliary, to some brittle facts of life. "I cannot tell you," she began, "what a pitfall it is to count on Prince Charming to make you feel better about yourself and take care of you. Prince Charming may be driving a Honda and telling you that you have no equal, but that won't do much good when you've got kids and a mortgage and he has a beer gut and a wandering eye. Prince Charming, if he does ride up in a Honda, he's going to expect you to make the payments."
In all the gasping that followed, Richards tried to come up with a softening sentence, but the one she settled on was harder than $100 worth of jawbreakers. "The point is," she said, "that the only person you can count on to be there when you need help is you."
That's where Ann Richards is from. There, and Lakeview, Texas (near Waco), a gentler-sounding but no more cosmopolitan launching pad than her parents' perfectly named hometowns: Bug Tussle and Hogjaw. She was Dorothy Ann then, and enchanted by the comic book heroine Wonder Woman, she was given to twirling a golden lariat and tossing herself off roofs.
Her father, Cecil Willis, was McLennan County's champion storyteller. They were Methodists among Baptists, and language was all they had to make them laugh. Lost in the silver-foot-in- his-mouth speech was this passage: "I can remember summer nights when we'd put down what we called a Baptist pallet, and we listened to the grown-ups talk. I can still hear the sound of the dominoes clicking on the marble slab my daddy found for a tabletop.
"I can still hear the laughter of the men telling jokes you weren't supposed to hear, telling about how big that old buck deer was -- laughing about Mama putting Clorox in the well when the frog fell in.
"They talked about war and Washington and what this country needed. They talked straight talk. And it came from people living their lives as best they could. And that's what we're gonna do tonight -- we're gonna tell how the cow ate the cabbage."
Changing times. She grew up to be the champion storyteller of Austin. For a while -- a good while -- she was also the champion wife and hostess.
