Wendy Davis’s Defenders

Article here. Excerpt:

'Following revelations that Wendy Davis fudged some of the details of her personal background and life story — a centerpiece of her long-shot gubernatorial campaign — the Left is rallying to her defense.

Predictably, rather than address the actual discrepancies in Davis’s “rags to riches” narrative, her liberal supporters have devoted most of their energy to blasting her critics as sexist foot-soldiers in the Republican party’s “war on women.”
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A ThinkProgress blogger charged that the attacks on Davis were drawn from a “classic sexist playbook,” and seemed to find hidden malice in Morning News reporter Wayne Slater’s innocuous statement that, owing to the admitted discrepancies in Davis’s personal narrative, “Some will question how much of her success was her own doing, and how bad her circumstances were to start.” The left-wing blogger argues that such questions are clearly absurd, citing as evidence the fact that Davis herself insists that such questions are, in fact, “absurd.”'

Feminist writers such as Jessica Valenti went after the Morning News for “trying to paint Wendy Davis a bad mother & gold-digger,” and presumably for quoting Davis’s second husband, Jeff Davis, who noted that their relationship ended almost immediately after he made the final payment on her Harvard Law School loan. “It was ironic,” he said. “I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left.” “Give me a [f***ing] break,” Valenti rebutted. She later wrote that she “look[s] forward to the day a male politician is criticized for having a spouse that supported his career.”