With all the talk of political dynasties passing the torch – or being shoved out of the way – little attention has been paid to another Democratic scion who shared the stage with Hillary Clinton last night.
Her name is Cecile Richards. And like her mother, the late Democratic matriarch and Texas Gov. Ann Richards, she is a powerful, in-your-face speaker who drives home political points with wit and, often, raunch.
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“Elections are about choices, and Mom would have said that women voting for John McCain would be like chickens choosing to vote for the Colonel,” Richards wrote in a recent column on Huffington Post.
Now president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Richards spent her time last night excoriating John McCain’s record on women’s health issues.
“John McCain has voted against women’s health care 125 times,” she said. “You can look it up: he voted against real sex education, against affordable family planning and, if elected, John McCain has vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Richards also recalled her mother’s sharp-tongued appraisal of then vice-president George H.W. Bush at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
“Poor George,” Ann Richards had said then. “He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
(Six years later, Ann Richards would be defeated by George W. Bush in her gubernatorial re-election campaign in Texas. She died from esophageal cancer in September, 2006.)
By all accounts, Cecille Richards is a chip off her mother’s block.
A 2004 Texas Monthly profile described her as ” a striking six-footer and longtime labor organizer with a bright, explosive laugh who can stop a room when she walks into it just as her mother can.”
She told the magazine how her involvement in politics was all but inevitable after growing up stuffing political mailings, learning precinct politics, and hosting anti-war rallies.
“Other families did bowling,” she said. “We did politics.”
Besides her mother’s involvements, her father, David Richards, was a labor lawyer involved in civil rights, among other issues.
“We represented every union in the South,” David Richards told Texas Monthly. “Teamsters and garment workers, plumbers and pipe fitters.”
For entertainment, the family would sit around in the evening, singing old union songs like “Joe Hill.”
After graduating from Brown in 1980, Cecile Richards worked as a union organizer, first among garment workers in the Rio Grande Valley, then with hotel workers in New Orleans and janitors in Los Angeles. Her work directing the Justice for Janitors campaign was dramatized by Adrien Brody in the movie Bread and Roses.
In 1982, Richards met her husband, Kirk Adams, also a labor organizer and now chief of staff of the Service Employees International Union, the largest union in America. The couple, who had three children, moved back to Texas in 1990 so they could work on Ann Richard’s campaign.
Her mother’s defeat in 1994 was what led Cecile Richards to refocus her energies on electoral politics.
After the loss, Richards 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.
Despite importunings to go into electoral politics, Cecile Richards followed her husband back to Washington in the late 1990s, and went to work for Ted Turner “to help build the infrastructure of the choice movement in America,” as she described it.
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, she left that job to become president of a new organization, America Votes, a coalition of several dozen progressive groups intent on turning out the Democratic vote in 2004.
That was the position from which Planned Parenthood recruited her in 2005. Richard had no health background, but brought the steely resolve, as well as the rolodex, of a seasoned political operative.
“Listen, the reason I took this job is, I feel like we need to go into the 21st century,” she told the Washington Post in 2006. “Clearly, with some folks in the country, we’re going to get there kicking and screaming.”
Under Richards’ leadership, the group has been an unabashed presence at the convention. Volunteers have been stationed outside the Pepsi Center, handing out over 700 pounds of pink-papered condoms labeled “Protect Yourself from John McCain.”