(The joke part)...
AUSTIN — In a surprise move, former Democratic governor Ann Richards of Texas defected from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign on Wednesday and joined a growing list of superdelegates to endorse Sen. Barack Obama for president, his campaign said.
"I'm honored to have earned the support of Governor Richards and am pleased that she'll play an important role in advancing our grassroots movement for change in Houston and across Texas," Obama said in a statement. "She's been a tireless advocate for working families and when I'm president we'll work together to put the American dream within reach of every child in Texas and across our country."
The REAL STORY on the flip...
I am of course alluding to this absolutely ghoulish story coming out of Texas today, where Hillary is using a Zombie to promote her candidacy... over the objections of 2/3 of deceased Governor Richards' immediate family.
Richards was governor from 1991-1995. She died in September 2006 at age 73. The two-minute video on Clinton's campaign Web site comes a week before the Texas primary and targets women voters in the state.
"So many women around Texas and America are saying, `Wish Ann was here, for us and for Hillary,'" a female voiceover says on the video.
"Today Ann would be asking all of us to make a statement. She would be traveling to every small town and big city in Texas, urging us all to take a stand, be counted, to make a difference, to make history," it says while a picture of Richards and Clinton appears on the screen. "This one's for Texas. This one's for our country. This one's for Ann."
But sons Dan and Clark Richards, partners at an Austin law firm, say nobody can know who the outspoken and opinionated former governor would have supported in the race between Clinton and Barack Obama.
"As her children, we never presumed to know her mind when alive and we are not prepared to make a claim as to who she would endorse or what she would do if she were still with us," they wrote in an e-mail last week. "We are not granting permission for her name to be used in advertisements on behalf of either candidate."
Petty on Day One.
UPDATE: The key graph in the story...
Dan Richards said in an interview Tuesday that they denied permission and he's angry the campaign published the video anyway. He said the campaign contacted him again last Friday to ask him to reconsider, and he repeated his objections.
(Hat Tip to Pager)
"They asked me if I would sue the campaign, and I said no, I wasn't in the business of suing the campaign, but I didn't think they should do it," he said in a telephone interview. "To try to present who she would endorse a year and a half after she died is offensive to me.
Discuss...