All it took was five days for Texas gubernatorial hopeful Wendy Davis’s campaign to go from baffling to downright obscene, again showing that neither she nor those aiding the effort knew what they were getting into in the first place.
It wasn’t enough that revelations of a distorted biography emerged, the details of which included her leaving an older man just a day after he completed payments for her Harvard Law education. Nor that the candidate herself signed onto a missive doubling down. “You’re damn right it’s a true story,” she said.
Her sophomoric camp had to go farther. They accused the campaign of Greg Abbott, her likely Republican opponent, of making the attacks, and Davis herself declared that “anyone who tries to say otherwise hasn’t walked a day in my shoes.”
Abbott, the Lone Star State’s attorney general, has been in a wheelchair since 1984.
Then came an obscene, reviling video to top it all off - Project Veritas released footage of Davis supporters, staffers of the Super PAC Battleground Texas, mocking Abbott’s disability.
“First of all, he is not good looking. He doesn’t speak very well; he doesn’t have a good personality; and he’s in a wheelchair,” one mused.
Davis immediately disavowed the comments as “abhorrent,” yet it’s she who quipped who said he “hasn’t walked a mile in my shoes” just days earlier.
For those of us who’ve followed her effort from its onset, a filibuster in support of late-term abortions, it’s honestly not that surprising. Wendy Davis’s campaign has made inconsistency its trend of choice.
Prior to last week they pre-emptively announced a fundraising haul of over $12 million. Conveniently unmentioned was that “a Battleground Texas-affiliated committee” raised around $4 million of the figure while her actual coffers had the remaining $8 million.
It’s fuzzy math at best, a $4 million distortion at worst. After all, the Super PAC seeking to turn Texas blue can’t operate in coordination with her bid for governor.
But hey, she wanted to own their fundraising; may as well own their rhetoric about Abbott, too.
Weeks earlier than that Davis sought to pitch her plan for Texas education. She just couldn’t offer any figures for how much it’d cost.
Don’t fret! She declared her plan could take on ideas “as a ship takes on water.”
What an analogy for rolling out a plan that’ll impact millions of Texas children, educators, and its economy, which has thrived under a model Democrats disdain.
It may be the best way to define her campaign when it’s all over.
Amid the doubling down on biographical distortions, the one policy issue she sought to pivot towards was gun rights, touting her gun ownership and intentions of obtaining a concealed carry permit.
What an about face. Davis previously waged a bid to end gun shows at municipal buildings and is on the record calling for background checks, saying she’d sign such legislation as governor if it found its way to her desk.
It’s apparent that inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and an overall childish mindset dominate Wendy Davis’s campaign. The idea of her as the key to bringing purple to Texas is clearly a memory. For proof, you need only look to Texas media outlets and their coverage of the ongoing fallout.
“I'm very skeptical that the Davis campaign has the talent and the knowledge of state issues to take Abbott on,” wrote Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka, not a conservative bomb thrower by any stretch.
“Davis missed her chance, and now the Republicans are having a field day with it. As they should. This is Texas politics, not a ping pong match,” said Todd Robberson of The Dallas Morning News, the paper which broke the story of the chinks in her biographical armor.
All of which is to say that Texas Democrats have an amateur hour liberal running as their best hope at statewide relevancy, and they’re wasting millions of dollars on the effort. If anything, they should disown her after this week.
They won’t, though, and the rest of us are better served for their stubborn disconnect from reality.
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