ustxtxb_obs_1992_05_22_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

of East Texas is campaigning on a rightThe reason many women candidates stand a good chance of winning, Morris says, is because they are becoming more adept at playing the political game. “Women’s organizing is now more sophisticated. Women are coming to understand that they have to think in terms of power, not just the amenities of life. The power question is crucial.” One of the reasons she wrote the book, Morris says, is to give women some sense of what is involved in a political campaign. “A lot of people have no idea what politics is about,” she says. “They are not aware of the extraordinary demands we place on our politicians. Somebody told me the other day that what has happened to Clinton is the modern equivalent of stoning. You remember it was Charles Dickens who pointed out in his American Notes that Americans have an impulse to tear people down.” Certainly Ann Richards knows something about that impulse, as Morris chronicles. It’s obvious from her book and her conversation that she admired the way Richards conducted herself during the bitterest of campaigns. It’s also obvious that Morris was more impressed with the Richards campaign than with the Feinstein effort, maybe because she had more access to the players on the Richards team and to the candidate herself. In California, she spent a lot of time talking to Feinstein aides and acquaintances, but the candidate remained, for the most part, elusive. She’s elusive on the page as well. With her fellow Texans, Morris obviously had a lot more fun. Her description of a campaign swing through Salado, New Braunfels and San Marcos, organized by old political pro Liz Carpenter, is lively and engaging and as inspirational as anything Theodore White ever wrote. Nothing from the Feinstein section matches it. Ultimately, however, the difference in tone. between the two sections of the book is a reflection of the difference between the two candidates. Morris believes that the former San Francisco mayor and now U.S. Senate candidate snatched defeat from the smiling jaws of victory. \(She lost to then-U.S. Sen t Pete Feinstein just didn’t work hard enough, her message was unfocused and she was inept at reaching out to traditional Democratic constituency groups. “Dianne Feinstein’s race, ultimately, was politics as usual.” Morris writes. Not so, Ann Richards. Not only did Richards profit from the experience of running two previous statewide races, she knew how to make connections and mobilize various groups, particularly women and minorities. She did it intuitively. Richards also inspired passion and enthusiasm. “The difference between Ann and Dianne is not so much, that more women were involved for Ann,” Morris says, “but the women voting for Ann were more invested. It meant more to them. They got other women involved, other men, and by a squeaker they pulled it off. And that was so exciting. It was exciting for people all over the country. “They were doing something together that’s fun and that they believed in,” Morris adds. “If we could bring that back to public life, that’s an enormous gift.” In the book, Morris quotes Kay Mills, an editor in the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times. Listening to the radio as she drove to work one morning from her home in Santa Monica, Mills heard Richards say: ” ‘Come January, we’re going to gather at the Congress Avenue Bridge and we’re going to link arms, and we’re going to take back the Capitol for the people of Texas!’ And Kay Mills got goose bumps. People all over the country identified with Ann Richards and saw in her election a promise that their own future might be more spacious and their nation’s more sane.” With a faith that would do Fannie Wright proud, Celia Morris believes in the possibility of that more spacious future, a future that could be as close as November ’92. “Women in the years to come will win with Feinstein’s politics,” she acknowledges. “The historical momentum, however, is behind Richards: in a country rhetorically committed to equality, the bills eventually fall due, and those most likely to lead the way to a more egalitarian society are the ones who have been left out. The 1990 general election vote reflected the biggest gender gap in history because it was a referendum on a world that white man had made, and the women’s vote went against them.” “The momentum will wax and wane, but more and more women will be in there,” Morris predicts. “I believe it will make a difference, and without believing in the millennium, I believe it will be a difference for the better.” Storming the Statehouse BY KAYE NORTHCCEIT Storming the Statehouse: Running for Governor with Ann Richards and Dianne Feinstein. By Celia Morris 325 pp. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. $25. CELIA MORRIS’ passionate feminism could have been put to use glossing over the rough spots in the Richards and Feinstein campaigns of 1990, making them out to be more virtuous than they were. Instead, she presents insightful warts-and-all accounts of the two gubernatorial races. Richards won. Feinstein lost. Each had one hell of a ride. The Richards chapters are an accurate and highly readable account of that down-and-dirty Former Observer editor Kaye Northcott covered the Richards/Clayton race for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where she is a political reporter. Texas campaign. Richards said she found the book uncomfortable because it pitched her back into the pain and intensity of those grueling months. Ironically, both women said they abhor negative campaigning, but both felt compelled by the opposition to engage in it. The Feinstein chapters are an excellent primer on California politics, where voter initiatives and professional consultants may have as much impact on races as the candidates themselves., \(Here’s just a taste of how different the dynamics are in California. More money was spent promoting 28 initiatives on the November 1990 ballots than on the race for governor. “So many and so complex were the propositions that the secretary of state mailed every registered voter two volumes that totaled almost 230 pages to explain them. Collectively they ran the risk of turning people off the Feinstein, who grew up in a troubled, wealthy Jewish family, turns out to be a woman of depth and surprises. The San Francisco ice queen whom constituents saw as more regal than the Queen of England turns to an conventional black minister as her political mentor and father confessor. She and Richards have little in common except membership in the Democratic Party, a sense of mission and undeniable star quality. But they simultaneously pushed the boundaries of women’s political power in this country. In the Texas campaign, questions of drug use, a rape joke and Clayton Williams’ refusal to shake Richards’ hand were the pivotal issues -if they can be called issues. It was a nasty, nasty year and the tone was set early by Attorney General Jim Mattox, whose record was more admirable than his ethics. Describing Richards in the Democratic primary, consultant George Shipley says, “She had to look into the heart of darkness. It had a name, and the name was Mattox.” Perhaps in a perverse way, Mattox’s decision to smear Richards with all the slime and innuendo he would a male opponent was a testa 16 MAY 22, 1992