Attacking Wendy with the Same Old Dogs

You may not be surprised to hear that the mud is already flying down in Texas, and being directed at Wendy Davis.

We can thank our media for being watchdogs of every little scrap of meat, stinking or otherwise, that campaigns toss at them.  In fact, the stinkier the better.  In this case, Politico ran a story about all the holes in Wendy Davis' biographical narrative, wherein the burning questions were whether she left her husband at 19 or 21 and that she got financial help getting through Harvard from her second husband.

Frankly, I expected better of Politico.  You don't have to sniff too closely to learn that the article was actually written by conservative Rich Lowry of the National Review.  Wendy's campaign fought back with the facts, and the critical assertion that trying to find dirt is what a campaign will do when it can't attack on the issues.

This nonsense reminds me of another campaign that fought successfully against the attempt to divert attention from issues to petty, irrelevant, and fallacious details.  I'm thinking about Elizabeth Warren, and Scott Brown's silly insistence on spending time talking about whether Warren ever claimed to be American Indian.

In both cases, on one side, we have really smart and gutsy women who know the issues, and know what's wrong and what needs to be done.  They are unafraid to stand up for what's right, and they know how to talk to the American people.  It terrifies their opponents.

Mitch McConnell is a typical bully -- mean spirited and whiny.  Last year his attacks on his presumed opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, came early and ugly.  McConnell is finding out that Grimes is unafraid to stand up to his nonsense.  He's also going to find out that the voters have had it with those games.

Just as Elizabeth Warren took the Senate seat from Scott Brown, Wendy Davis is going to win the governorship of Texas from her opponent, Greg Abbott, and Alison Lundergan Grimes will take on and beat McConnell.

As the season progresses, we voters need to look beneath the headlines, ask the right questions, confront the lies and keep returning to the real issues.

Myself, I'm looking forward to some smart tough women here in South Carolina to take on those bullies, the ones who won't spend a penny to provide health care to an infant but bleat about the need to control women in order to save a fetus.  I know those women are out there.

You know who you are.

It Takes a Woman

Something amazing is going on.  In the election of 2012 more women were elected to office than ever before.  Voters knew that pretty faces like Scott Brown of Massachusetts masked more of the same white-men-in-power style politics.

In 2012, the voters replaced Brown in the Senate with Elizabeth Warren, who will clean up the financial mess those rich white guys have made, and Tammy Duckworth handily beat Tea Party candidate Joe Walsh, the first Asian-American woman, and first female disabled veteran to serve in Illinois and then in the US House.  Then there is Tammy Baldwin, first openly gay person to serve in the Senate.

Women like these are not just crashing a lot of glass ceilings, they are fighting for those of us who have been out-numbered and out-spent.  They have looked at the horrific quality of life that greed and ignorance have brought to bear in our country and said, "Uh-uh, no more."  They are fighting for pay equity, a living wage, and food stamps and health care.  They are fighting to regain losses in women's reproductive freedom and privacy and protections from violence.

We have another election cycle coming up, and those republican men are still trying to take away our health care, food stamps, birth control, public radio and public schools.  Despite the crazy-quilt of gerrymandering, we have some great women running for office, and we are not going to be defeated.

And I'm hoping to write about as much of it as I can.

Some of you may not remember her name, but Wendy Davis recently became a hero when she stood her ground on the floor of the Texas State Legislature filibustering the medieval abortion regulations being proposed.  In true Texas fashion, men first created tough filibuster rules and then tried to break the filibuster anyway, followed by creating new rules so that they could pass the bill at a later date.

So Wendy Davis is running for governor.

We'll move this country forward and take the old white men with us.  We're on our feet and we're not going anywhere but up.