NATIONAL ELECTIONS / TEXAS RUNOFF : Richards Leads Mattox in Early Ballot Counts : Politics: The treasurer holds a 55% to 45% edge. The voting caps a bitter campaign for the Democratic nod in the governor’s race.

Ann Richards, the Texas state treasurer who gained national prominence with a sarcastic keynote attack on George Bush at the 1988 Democratic Convention, edged into an early lead over Atty. Gen. Jim Mattox in the state’s Democratic gubernatorial runoff election Tuesday.

Richards and Mattox fought bitterly to win the chance to face Republican candidate Clayton Williams Jr., a political neophyte whose folksy cowboy-millionaire image swept him to victory in the April primary over his more experienced rivals.

Williams has said he would be more uncomfortable facing a woman and Republican strategists have said Richards could be a more formidable opponent than Mattox in the gubernatorial face-off.

With 4% of the vote counted, Richards was leading with 74,594 votes, or 55%, compared to 60,025, or 45%, for Mattox. Many of the early votes counted were in urban areas, where much of Richards’ strength lies.

The contest between Richards and Mattox was one of the nastiest in Texas history. Both candidates pledged to run a clean campaign, but the promise was hardly out of their mouths when the contest was reduced to a name-calling match virtually devoid of any discussion of issues.

Most vocal was Mattox, a man known to run no-holds-barred campaigns throughout his political career. He launched his attack early on, insinuating at first that Richards had been a user of illegal drugs 10 years ago before she underwent treatment for alcoholism. He ran televisions ads asking, but not answering, the question of whether she had used drugs and challenged Richards to produce her medical treatment records to prove that she was treated only for alcoholism.

Finally, in the closing days of the campaign, he accused Richards outright of having once been a cocaine addict. He also said he had affidavits from people who saw her use illegal drugs. Yet he never made the affidavits public.

For her part, Richards compared Mattox on the last day of the campaign to a “chicken-eating dog” who needed to be broken of his bad habits.

Among other things, she accused Mattox of hiding his true personal income and chided him for refusing to make public his income tax returns, as she had done. In television commercials, she pointed out that Mattox had been indicted in 1983 on bribery charges, but failed to mention that he had been acquitted.

She also called into question his receiving $200,000 in a land deal from a man now under indictment on racketeering charges. Like Mattox, she offered no proof that her opponent had actually done anything wrong.

The runoff followed a bitter three-way primary fight in which neither Richards nor Mattox gained a majority. Richards dealt a blow to former Gov. Mark White in the primary, accusing him of lining his pockets while in office. After being eliminated in the primary, White accused Richards of using Gestapo tactics.

The intensity of the campaign surprised even the most jaded observers of Texas politics, which has long been known as a place where political campaigns are bare-knuckle scraps. Pollster Richard Murray said he would have believed the usually tough Democratic primary would have moved in the direction of moderation in view of the fact that Republicans were gaining ground in what was once an essentially one party state.

“I guess the learning curve has flattened out,” he said.

George Christian, former White House press secretary and now a political consultant in Austin, called the Richards-Mattox battle the worst he had seen since the advent of television advertising and he said the news media was to blame, at least in part.

“The press was more apt to print unsubstantiated charges that were thrown around,” he said. “I think the press was used more by all the campaigns than I’ve ever seen it.”

In a statewide poll published Sunday in the Houston Chronicle, Richards was given a slight lead over Mattox, despite what was commonly described by political observers here as a poorly-run campaign in which she allowed Mattox’ bulldozer approach to set the tone.

“She allowed others to control the agenda of the campaign,” said State Lands Commissioner Garry Mauro.

Conventional wisdom was that Richards would carry the large population centers, with the upscale city voters as her core of support, while Mattox would tap his strength in rural East and South Texas. But the race was so close on election day that even bad weather in a major metropolitan area could have turned the tide. On Tuesday, both candidates were keeping a wary eye on the weather.