#TeamWendy: Is @WendyDavisTexas running away from her pro-abortion record?

Wendy Davis' shoes
These shoes were made for runnin’ … away from your pro-abortion record? Photo via Dallas News.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty noticed this from a fundraiser email sent out by Davis supporter and San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro:

Friend –

I just had a great meeting with my friend Wendy Davis here in San Antonio.

We talked about job creation and economic empowerment for all Texans β€” and I left reminded of her extraordinary determination to make Texas even better than it already is.

If you caught Wendy’s announcement speech last week, you saw why she’s been able to inspire so many people, both here in Texas and across the country. I’m going to do everything I can between now and next November to make sure she gets to the Governor’s Mansion.

Show Senator Davis she’s not taking on this challenge alone β€” add your name to say you’re with Wendy for governor in 2014.

Wendy is fearless.

She overcame a background of poverty to put herself through Harvard law school.

She once stood for hours to filibuster a bill that would have resulted in billions of dollars in cuts to public education for our kids.

“Stood for hours” in a filibuster over …. cuts in education funding? Β Geraghty rightly calls foul:

Castro (or the staffer who wrote this) is just flat-out lying.Β Β Davis made aΒ one-hour-and-fifteen minuteΒ filibusterΒ in 2011 about public education spending. The only time she stood for β€œhours” was in herΒ 2013 filibuster to stop a billΒ that would ”ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, require abortion clinics to meet the same standards that hospital-style surgical centers do, and mandate that a doctor who performs abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.”

The Castro e-mail is attempting to blur the lines between the two filibusters, perhaps hoping they can fool people that the more recent and high-profile filibuster wasn’t really about late-term abortions but about education.

Nowhere in that email is the mention of abortion, and that’s not the only place you can’t find it. Β  Watch her four and a half minute “intro” video to the state of Texas. No mention of abortion. At all. In fact, she doesn’t even mention her party affiliation, which even the liberal LA Times noticed:

What’s missing in the four-minute-30-second spot? Any mention of Davis’ party affiliation, to wit, her affiliation with the Democratic Party.

The two-term state senator from Fort Worth is waging a decidedly uphill fight in the race to succeed Republican Gov. Rick Perry. It’s been more than two decades since Texans elected a Democratic governor,Β  and Republicans are riding a winning streak of more than 100 victories in statewide contests.

Although Davis vaulted to overnight celebrity on the strength of her June filibuster against antiabortion legislation, she can’t possibly win running as an abortion rights crusader or champion of the political left. That explains why she made no mention of her famous filibuster inΒ last week’s announcement speech, focusing instead on education and accountability in Austin, the state capital.

It also explains the omission of the D-word β€” no, not Dallas β€” in her new campaign video.

But Texans needn’t worry. By the time the campaign is over, Republicans will have worked so hard tying her to the national Democratic Party that voters might think it’s Davis, not Joe Biden, who is President Obama’s understudy in the White House.

As they should. After all, hasn’t Ms. Davis’ name been mentioned as a possible VP candidate to Hillary Clinton, should the former Secretary of State decide to run for the Oval Office again? Yep.

This is all very interesting. Who would have ever thought that the “courageous” woman who “stood for hours in pink (actually rouge red) tennis shoes’ for the right to mutilate your unborn baby after 20 weeks would, in so many words, be running away from her now ‘legendary’ record on the topic – even going so far as to pose in a campaign photo with children who were fortunate enough to be born? Let’s hope she held on to those sneakers …

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