What happens if you are a candidate for governor and you lose badly? Not just a mere bad loss but one of historically bad proportions following an absolutely horrible campaign marked by the cowardice of shying from previously well known positions. Well, if you are a liberal it could mean you can score a TV show based on the aftermath of your loss. Such is the case with Wendy Davis. The "Abortion Barbie" of Texas who mostly avoided that for which she was best known is the inspiration of a "dramedy" show based on life after going down to complete defeat after refusing to stand up for what she really believed during her gubernatorial campaign. Deadline Hollywood describes the NBC show based on the cowardly campaigner:
Wendy Davis made national headlines in 2013 for filibustering anti-abortion legislation in the Texas Senate. Now the former Democratic state senator is poised for more national attention as the inspiration for a dramedy series in development at NBC.
Written by Jennifer Cecil, the untitled project centers on a female Democratic senator who, after losing the Texas governor’s race, gets her world turned upside down. In the vein of The Good Wife, while she pieces her pride back together, she goes to work in the law firm of her best friend — a black male Republican — and discovers that with no political future to protect, she can unshackle her inner badass.
...A Harvard-educated lawyer, Davis represented District 10 in the Texas Senate from 2009-15. She made national news in June 2013 when she staged an 11-hour filibuster to block a Senate bill imposing major new restrictions on abortions. The filibuster, which drew support from President Obama, was successful, but the bill ultimately passed. The move made Davis a political star, leading to a run for governor last year, which she lost in the general election. Since then, Davis had been working on a new women’s equality initiative targeting millennials.
What this report fails to tell us is that Davis declined to stand up for her convictions during her gubernatorial campaign until she finally realized she had no chance. The source for this is from the reliably liberal Texas Tribune which published a postmortem report on her campaign disaster:
On the day last year when state Sen. Wendy Davis launched her bid for the Texas Governor’s Mansion, something she failed to mention got almost as much attention as the speech itself: her filibuster of a bill creating new abortion regulations.
After all, it was that June 2013 stand against the legislation that propelled Davis into instant celebrity and made her a rare Texas Democratic fundraising phenom, so leaving it out was noticeable.
...Thirteen months later, that unexecuted strategy sits atop a trash heap of failed tactics, unmet goals and muddled messages that helped doom Davis to an embarrassing defeat long before the voters rendered their verdict Tuesday night.
...for more than a year, Democrats were crowing that with a well-funded turnout operation, Davis was the kind of candidate who could at least move the needle for the bedraggled party, which hadn’t won a statewide election since 1994. In one sense they were correct: She moved the needle, all right — backward.
...And Davis’ message?
Whatever it started out as, it bordered on incoherence in the waning days of the race.
...If the campaign telegraphed early caution on the abortion issue, Davis threw it to the wind two months out from Election Day, when she released a memoir about her own late abortion in 1997. She went on a weeklong book tour that inevitably focused on abortion rights, followed up by another week spent on the same subject — namely, bashing Abbott for opposing abortion even in cases of rape or incest.
On gun rights, she riled conservatives last fall by embracing restrictions on firearms sales at gun shows, only to take friendly fire in February from bewildered liberal supporters when she agreed with Abbott that Texans should be allowed to openly carry handguns.
So if the the new NBC "dramedy" makes an attempt at some degree of accuracy, its main character should be a conniving opportunistic woman who does not shy from flip-flopping on well known positions for political gain. Hey, I just thought of another political woman that NBC could make a "dramedy" about!
