This entry was posted on 9/14/2006 12:50 PM and is filed under All Posts, Obituaries.
She has passed away. They do not make them like her anymore. She was that rare person that really does feel irreplaceable.
Ann served as Governor of Texas from 1990-1994. But I always found her story more inspiring when I learned what she went through to get there. Just as her political career was beginning to bloom, the strain of it caused her and her husband to divorce in 1976, leaving her to raise 4 children mostly on her own. The divorce, coupled with the stress of political life, drove her to alcoholism. These burdens, along with the added difficulty of being an outspoken, liberal woman in a very conservative, almost culturally backwards state, would have caused most people to abandon any hopes of large-scale political success.
But not Ann. She went into rehab in 1980, broke her addiction, dove back into her work, and in 1982 was elected Texas State Treasurer, the first woman elected to statewide office in more than fifty years. Re-elected in 1986, it was clear to the national Democratic Party that they had a rising star on their hands, and gave her the plum keynote speakership at the 1988 Democratic Convention.
Her unsparing, brilliant speech that year made it seem that she was destined for national success. My parents actually took my sisters and I to the convention that year in Atlanta. Though I don't remember much about her speech specifically (I was 9), I certainly remember her.
I'd never seen a female politician like her before. She had this crazy, mythic white hair, these intense blue eyes that lit up the convention hall, and this huge, whipping Texas voice that made you love Southerners all over again. When Michael Dukakis lost the entire South a few months later, I remember not understanding why, because that's where she was from.
Ann became such a cultural icon it is hard to believe she ever lost at anything. Who would ever vote against her? But she did lose, of course. She lost the Governorship of Texas in 1994 to a young, inarticulate, laughably inexperienced baseball team owner named George W. Bush. She had the tide of the Gingrich Revolution working overtime against her, but she was also up against a new politics of meanness that George H. W. Bush spawned, and his son had mastered.
No matter. She will be remembered as a better governor, and a far better human being, than will he.
If anyone would like to listen to her 1988 keynote speech at the Democratic convention, it's right here.
