The left’s boot-licking relationship with Wendy Davis is an extended exercise in damage control. They are trying to transform her into gold somehow.
The Davis saga is a bad omen for the left in their fight to extend the abortion holocaust, our country’s great shame. The left is much more aware of this than anyone else, and are obsessed with taking this situation somewhere safer, where they don’t yet know. In the meantime the political left are trying to find Davis her softest landing, and media are reflexively, obnoxiously, and unconvincingly selling her.
Wendy Davis is bad for the left for three big reasons.
The first and most important is the major pro-life legislative gains she failed to prevent. There have been pro-lifers wanting and planning for progress for a long time. Now, for two sessions in a row the Texas pro-life movement is making serious gains. This is making the left very uncomfortable. It also represents a big defeat for Joe Straus, who flexed his muscles against the pro-life lobby at the beginning of the session only to be ultimately steamrolled.
Secondly, Davis stuck her neck out for abortion and got her head handed to her. Her political consequences couldn’t have been higher. She is a model for prominently protect this barbarism in the new, much tougher and more confident era of pro-life activism. Though she is finished politically, someone seems to think it is better for her to lose a gubernatorial race than her senate seat, so she’s talking gubernatorial candidacy right now. This is pure PR.
Thirdly, average Americans are making Davis into “Abortion Barbie” faster than the media can manufacture useful celebrity for her. It must be unsettling for them. This fact explains most of the media’s pro-Davis chorus. They need to salvage something positive for her to downplay her political decimation due to fighting for abortion. Any second profession gifted to Davis by someone on the left, should that happen, will be a monument to her political defeat.
Particularly fun to watch in this is Evan Smith at the Texas Tribune. For a guy who likes to play things straight, he’s bought early and often into the pro-Davis bluff. In something of a modern day alchemy project, he’s working hard on making Davis into the new Ann Richards. How obliged to this project is he? One of his writers scurried over to Texas Monthly, seeding an article about how Davis propaganda, which it appears the Texas Tribune will be peppered with for the foreseeable future, isn’t really propaganda.
Wendy Davis represents a huge legislative, political, and cultural victory for the unborn. More ominous for the left, she represents a serious legislative, political, and cultural defeat for one of the left’s flagship causes – the normalization of promiscuous sex.