Good afternoon Austin:

So I spent most of Saturday prepping for my big, long-awaited, first-ever interview with Wendy Davis scheduled for Monday afternoon. But Saturday night I was at the Continental Club to see Barrence Whitfield and the Savages, who I had been a fan of back in Massachusetts in the 1980s. Homer Henderson, the mostly one-man band, opened for the Savages and he was great, performing his off-kilter classic,Lee Harvey was a friend of mine.  (Lee Harvey was a friend of mine. He used to take me fishin' all the time. He used to throw the ball to me when I was just a kid. They say he shot the president, but I don't think he did.")

And Barrence, the soul screamer, whose given name, believe it or not, is Barry White, and who studied journalism at Boston University, did not disappoint, performing songs that paid tribute to everyone from the unlikely overweight, heavyweight Willie Meehan, who twice beat Jack Dempsey, to the mordant wit Oscar Levant, probably best known for his performance in An American in Paris.

Anyway, it was sometime after midnight, the Savages were reaching the crescendo of their performance and, terrible tick that it is, I looked at my phone to check my email, and there it was on my Wendy Davis Google alert  - a Dallas Morning News story by Wayne Slater under the headline, As Wendy Davis touts life story in race for governor, key facts blurred.

 Damn, I thought to myself, and then, after quickly scrolling through the story, returned to that thought. Damn, damn, damn.

It was mostly all there, the story that I had been working on way too slowly and only very sporadically for months, the one that I couldn't begin to write until I had my interview with Wendy Davis, the interview that, was, at that moment, only a day way.

I scrolled back through the story, to try to figure out when Wayne had nailed it down.

In an extensive interview last week, Davis acknowledged some chronological errors and incomplete details in what she and her aides have said about her life.

Slater, I said to myself, like Jerry Seinfeld intoning Newman.

I had sought the interview back in the fall. I had, as I mentioned, never interviewed Davis one-on-one, I had never written a bio piece on her, and I asked Rebecca Acuña, her press person, for the interview for purposes of writing that story with a special focus, I told Acuña, on the "trailer-park-to-Harvard" Texas story that had become the inspirational narrative of her campaign. Sure, I was told, but her schedule was incredibly busy. How about a phone interview? No, I said, not for this, not with someone with whom I didn't have a pre-established rapport. Weeks passed. She was traveling. I was traveling. It was the holidays, then the New Year. Then, on January 13, I got a text from Acuña telling me they had penciled me in for an interview on Jan. 20. Excellent.

At that point - and right up until I saw Wayne's story - I wasn't planning on writing something immediately off the interview - though I now realize it may have been foolish of me to think that I could hold off. Rather I thought the interview would give me what I needed to talk to other folks and write what I knew would be a very difficult story to get right, to strike the right balance. From the moment Davis blazed onto the national scene in an almost unprecedented fashion in June, I was very interested in the "star-making machinery," and how Davis and the media had a coincident interest in developing the most succinct and compelling shorthand for who she was and where she came from. It was also interesting to me that, for the purposes of political biography these days, it seemed far better, more compelling and even heroic to have been a single mother, and better still, the single mother, daughter of a single mother.

But on Sunday I was facing a dilemma. I had been beat on the story by Wayne, who not only had talked to Davis but to her ex-husband, Jeff Davis. I had also talked to Jeff Davis but, while he was very friendly, was not, when I reached him some weeks ago, interested in an on-the-record conversation out of concern for the two daughters he raised with Davis, and I found that I couldn't really argue with him on that.

My first impulse on Sunday was that I should wait until my Monday interview with Davis to write anything. But that would have meant the Statesman would either have nothing in Monday's paper on what was really a pretty big story in the life of this gubernatorial campaign, or we would have to run Wayne's story. I would have to write something for Monday's paper, and then, after interviewing Davis Monday afternoon, write another story. I sent Acuña a handful of questions Sunday, and she offered a general reply without addressing the specifics.

I wrote the story. It appeared on Page One Monday, and then I resumed preparing for my interview with Davis, scheduled for 3 p.m. But just before 11:30 a.m. Monday, I received a message from Acuña: "We're canceling today's interview."

When I called her back, she explained that since I had gone ahead and written my "bio" story in Monday's paper, without talking to Davis, that there was no longer a need for an interview, and that was that.

Huh. Well, that's too bad, I thought. Should I have not written the Monday story? But how could I not? And what if I hadn't written the Monday story and they had canceled my Monday interview anyway because they didn't want to talk about this any more? I was disappointed but I was taking it all in stride until shortly after 2, less than an hour before what would have been my interview, when Drew Anderson, Davis' regional press secretary, sent out an email with a statement from Davis "about the recent personal attacks coming from last weekend."

Here it is:

"We’re not surprised by Greg Abbott’s campaign attacks on the personal story of my life as a single mother who worked hard to get ahead. But they won’t work, because my story is the story of millions of Texas women who know the strength it takes when you’re young, alone and a mother.

I’ve always been open about my life not because my story is unique, but because it isn’t.

The truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce.  And I knew then that I was going to have to work my way up and out of that life if I was going to give my daughter a better life and a better future and that’s what I’ve done. I am proud of where I came from and I am proud of what I’ve been able to achieve through hard work and perseverance. And I guarantee you that anyone who tries to say otherwise hasn’t walked a day in my shoes."

That was followed by a more detailed account of her "early biography." It looked to me like it would have been the perfect document to have dropped in my lap at our 3 o'clock interview. Now I was beginning to feel like some poor schlub who is all dressed up for some important event, standing on the curb on a wet day when some SUV drives by through a big puddle and splatters mud all over me. And then, before I've fully absorbed what just happened, the SUV has backed up and splashed me again. But that wasn't the end of it, because then there was the SUV again, having apparently circled the block, back for a third splash, this time in the form of a Peggy Fikac story posted yesterday afternoon by the San Antonio Express- News.

Facing questions about the story she tells of her journey from a struggling single mom in a trailer park to Harvard-educated lawyer, Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis went on the offensive Monday against Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott, her expected general-election foe in the race for governor.

In an interview, she called him “completely out of touch with the reality of the struggles that a young woman like I faced."

Interview? Was that interview conducted during the hallowed 3 o'clock time slot that had once been mine?

In the meantime, the Davis counteroffensive had continued.

Matt Angle, a top strategist who runs the Lone Star Project, characterized the attacks on Davis as "a malicious expression of fear" by the Abbott campaign, though Slater said he never once spoke to them about the story. But, Angle wrote:

 

Greg Abbott knows that Wendy connects with and inspires Texans.  (For) (t)he Abbott campaign to tear down Wendy and her family show an overall hostility to mothers who have to juggle work with getting an education with raising their kids.  Moreover the attacks show that Abbott is profoundly out of touch with Texans who face challenges and meet them with a courage he just can’t muster. 

 Wendy Davis has given more detail and been more forthcoming about her past than about any candidate I’ve ever been around.  There is not a single detail that has been challenged that in any way diminishes her compelling life story.   A lot of the confusion centers around what others have said who have recounted Wendy’s story in their own words.  The bottom line is straight-forward:  Wendy struggled through some tough times when she was younger, worked hard, fought hard and came out a success, with daughters who adore her.  That’s a real and inspiring Texas story that terrifies Greg Abbott.”

In a statement, Grace Garcia, head of Annie's List, which recruits, trains and funds women Democratic candidates in Texas and which has been behind Davis throughout her career, also blamed Abbott and the Republicans.

“Disputing the details of Wendy Davis’ life is especially offensive to the many Texas women who can relate to her story. In trying to tear down Senator Davis’ campaign and her personal story, Republicans are also tearing down all Texans who have overcome difficult circumstances. It’s clear Greg Abbott doesn’t understand Wendy Davis’ struggles and the struggles of millions of Texans, nor does he want to.”  

But as Fikac wrote, back in September, even before Davis announced governor, in a commentary under the headline, Davis must be ready for a harsh spotlight:

Sen. Wendy Davis has highlighted a shorthand version of her life as she nears her announcement about whether she'll run for governor. It's a pulled-herself-up-by-her-bootstraps story that starts with being raised by a single mom, finds her in a trailer park as a divorced single mother herself, then triumphantly fast-forwards from community college to Texas Christian University to Harvard Law School.

As I and others have reported, the full story is more complex, including her second marriage to former Fort Worth City Council member Jeff Davis, which lasted 18 years from their wedding to the divorce being finalized.

Some have suggested that Davis' personal life wouldn't get this type of attention if she weren't a woman, but this is the wrong place to play that card. Davis has repeatedly put her personal story out there. It's part of what caught the national imagination after her much-noted filibuster against tighter abortion regulations.

Reporting's what we do.

 

The commentary followed an excellent story by Fikac -  Wendy Davis: Single mom to political phenom - which was very much the forerunner of Wayne Slater's story.

She already is getting the kind of scrutiny that accompanies a statewide race, with more details emerging about her trailer park-to-Harvard Law School life story, which inspires her focus on education.

And then, from her ex, Jeff Davis:

"They've asked me not to talk to reporters," Jeff said. He is anyway, because: "If she runs, the scrutiny on her will be extraordinary. She needs to deal with it in a constructive way. She needs to take control of the message. ... My goal in all this, I think, is just try and protect the kids as much as I can."

The day before Fikac's story appeared, Jay Root's story in the Texas Tribune also foreshadowed the current controversy.

Wendy Davis burst into the national political consciousness this summer as a feminist folk hero. She was a titan in pink tennis shoes, a single mother who became a lawyer, stood up to the Republican boys club and, against all odds, temporarily halted enactment of a restrictive abortion bill.

Last week, a different side of the Democratic state senator emerged: the devoted daughter of an ailing father, Jerry Russell, who is well known in Fort Worth theater circles but isn’t mentioned in her compelling campaign biography. Her mother, a sixth grade dropout who made do without child support, is the one who figures prominently in the back story that inspires Davis’ followers.

As it turns out, Davis’ story is more complicated and nuanced than legend would have it. That is not altogether surprising. Getting to know people, even famous ones, takes time. But Davis — whose moribund party badly needs a superstar — rode a filibuster into the political stratosphere, and now her supporters are all but forcing her to run for Texas governor.

If she does, her biography will fall under a more powerful microscope, and what voters are likely to find is the story of an exceptionally ambitious woman who has experienced both poverty and wealth, isn’t nearly as partisan as her detractors might think and was shaped as much by her single electoral defeat as the unbroken string of victories ever since.

 

Those stories were written as Davis was at her father's bedside where he lay dying. I recall at the time that the scene provoked a certain cognitive dissonance - not because of anything she had said, and not because it did not make perfect sense that she would be there, but because, in the shorthand political narrative of her life, her father was, by implication, the heavy - the father who had left her mother with four children and provided precious little in financial support. But of course, in the messy reality of life, her father could have left the family in the financial lurch, and still, as she toldVogue, be "a good dad."

"My dad is truly the person who always made me believe in myself, to appreciate that I was smart."

And it was Davis' father who rose to her defense when Gov. Rick Perry, at the National Right to Life Convention shortly after Davis' abortion filibuster, sought to cast Davis' life as an argument against abortion.

Asking who "are we to say that children born into the worst of circumstances can’t grow to live successful lives?" Perry noted, "that even the woman who filibustered the Senate the other day was born into difficult circumstances. She was the daughter of a single mother. She was a teenaged mother herself. She eventually graduated from Harvard Law School and served in the Texas Senate."

But, as PolitiFact Texas reported:

Jerry Russell, Davis’ father and the founder of a Fort Worth theater, returned our telephone call about Perry’s claim and challenged the reference to Davis being "born into difficult circumstances." Russell said it was "totally incorrect" to conclude that Davis was born to a single mother. Rather, he said, he and Davis’ mother were wedded in Rhode Island in 1958, some five years before Davis, the third of their four children, was born there, he said.

Russell initially told us the couple moved to Fort Worth in 1973 and separated in 1976, around when the future senator was 13. He shortly called back and said the separation probably occurred "closer to" a couple years earlier, as Davis testified.

"From that point on," Russell said, "I wasn’t present in the" family "home, but I was present in Wendy’s life."

Russell said that his ex-wife remarried two or three years after their split and then another time later. He declined to elaborate. According to online Tarrant County records, Davis’ mother, Virginia, whom we failed to reach, married Ira Cornstubble in May 1994.

But, of course, Perry was relying on what Davis had said about herself.

As she put it in typical fashion in a 2011 interview with Generation TX:

“I was raised by a single mom. There were four children in our family, and my mother only had a sixth-grade education. And it was really a struggle for us."

xxxxxxx

"After I graduated, I got married and divorced, and by the time I was nineteen, I was a single parent. And I was living in a mobile home in southeast Fort Worth, and I was destined to live the life that I watched my mother live. I didn’t really know how to see anything other than the world I was existing in. And I really didn’t see a way out of it.”

The question of whether she was 19 or 21 when her divorce was finalized seems a picayune quibble, unless one is of a cynical turn of mind and thinks that there was some marginal political advantage in being able to describe oneself as a "teen" single mother. It doesn't change a whit what she achieved or the odds she overcame.

And does it matter whether her mother had only a sixth-grade education - as per the oft-told narrative, which was repeated in story after story  - or, according to Monday's corrected version, "had attended school only into the ninth grade, and whose own father had only a sixth grade education?"Ater all, a six is only a nine turned upside down, and, like the difference between 19 and 21, it makes no fundaemental difference, unless it indicates a pattern of s finessing the facts.

Apparently Davis never noticed her mother's identification with Muleshoe High School on her Facebook page.

But, Acuña said in an email, "Last week Senator Davis called her mother, and her mother told her she had a 9th grade education." It was her grandfather with the sixth--grade education. (And never mind that her mother's photo appears on the sophomore page of the 1954 Muleshoe High School yearbook - maybe 9th was the last grade she completed.)

Will all of this have any longterm impact -  positive or negative (because it appears to be energizing both supporters and detractors) - on Davis' chances of becoming governor?

Here is a little of what Mark Z. Barabak wrote in the Los Angeles Times, about the Davis controversy, likening "the flyspeck scrutiny of a big-time campaign and explaining away small but nagging inconsistencies in a personal story," with what befell Gary Hart when he ran for president the first time in 1984:

The Colorado senator and dark horse presidential candidate finished a distant second behind former Vice President Walter Mondale in the 1984 Iowa caucuses, losing 49% to 17%. But in the odd alchemy of presidential politics, Hart was declared the “winner” of the caucuses -- despite the 32-point blowout -- because he held Mondale below 50% and outperformed “expectations.” (Well, why not?) Hart went on to win the New Hampshire primary and emerge, for a time, as a serious challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination until a slow unraveling that involved a series of nagging questions about the self-portrayal he put forth in his campaign. He had, for instance, shaved a year off his age, shortened the family name from Hartpence to Hart and altered his personal signature several times.

xxxxx

No candidacy goes entirely smoothly, and it is to Davis’ great benefit that the question marks about her background surfaced in January rather than July. But if a pattern of shaded truths or inconsistencies emerges over the coming weeks and months, an already difficult contest could quickly slip beyond the Democrat’s grasp.

Just ask Gary Hartpence.