Absolutely brutal (and correct) assessment of Wendy Davis’ core political problem
“Americans will forgive a lot in a politician. But a woman who leaves her kids is just beyond the pale.”
Naomi Schaefer Riley writing in The NY Post has a brutal assessment of why Wendy Davis has no future in politics.
It’s a brutal assessment that I think is right, and one that will drive Davis’ most ardent supporters crazy because it cannot be wordsmithed or talking-pointed.
The problem gets to the deepest emotional level that cuts across the political spectrum:
After Jeff finished paying off the last of Wendy’s school loans, she filed for divorce and gave up custody of her children. According to Jeff, his wife just decided, “While I’ve been a good mother, it’s not a good time for me right now.”….
There are single mothers all over the country in dire straits who can’t afford to have such a thought. And even if someone offered them the chance to get away from it all and start over without a child, few of them would say yes.
Sure, there are women who pursue high-powered careers and need to spend time away from their children. Take Florida Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz, who (according to a recent New York Times blog) manages to do plenty with her 9-year-old and 13-year-old twins over the course of a weekend at home. She played basketball with her son, read with her daughter, shuttled one to ballet, took another to the bookstore and out to lunch.
Still, when her son complains about her work schedule, she says, “My heart hurts.” Can you imagine Wasserman Schultz saying “it’s not a good time” for her to be a mother? ….
A few years ago, one of my guy friends was dating a woman who didn’t have custody of her child. Every one of this man’s female friends told him to run. The fact that she would either willingly give up custody or that a judge would deem her unworthy of even joint custody raised alarm bells.
Feel free to call it sexism, if you want. But it’s a double standard that I don’t expect will change any time soon.
Americans will forgive a lot in a politician. But a woman who leaves her kids is just beyond the pale.
This line is devastating:
[Jeff Davis] not only took on raising his own daughter alone, but also another girl, who’d been abandoned first by her father and then her mother.
Cue the cries of outrage. They won’t do any good.
Related Posts:
- Wendy Davis is no Elizabeth Warren
- Wendy Davis 2008: “There’s value in sitting back and reflecting on your own shortcomings.”
- Wendy Davis’ ex-husband: “They’ve asked me not to talk to reporters”
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Comments
To be brutally honest, one can say she sold her kids for a college degree.
freddgeorge,
The kid were not what she “sold” (rented in more polite parlance). The kids were parting gifts like on a game show.
Best
While she did leave her kids behind while at Harvard, the actual divorce happened when the older daughter (not Jim Davis’s) was already 23 and the younger was 17 and, I believe, a senior in high school. How many parents would rip a kid out of the home they grew up in during their senior year?
The youngest was actually 15.
When she left, yes. The divorce, and thus the “not a good time for Me! Me! Meeee!” comment came 2 years later.
If you were her children – you would wonder if her crusade for abortion was because you were born and interrupted her dreams.
But when she left, the kids stayed, right?
The 15 year old stayed in her home. The 21 year old was an adult and could do as she wished–no custody was at stake.
The older daughter continued to live with her step father after her mother left while in she was in college. She had a devoted step father, little sister and a stable home with him. The divorce drug on for over two years and required mediation and a sale of the title company that he had founded (before the marriage) to pay her and end it.
When somebody compares negatively to Deborah Wasserman Schultz, that person has very little to commend them.
“Mommy Dearest” Davis absented herself from the lives of her daughters as her political ambitions suggested.
Children are quite disposable to this lady…her own as well as those of others.
A worse mother than even Obama’s flighty mum.
“it’s not a good time for me to be a mother” is what you say to your husband when you’re discussing getting pregnant. It’s not what you say when you have a toddler and your other child is not your husband’s. It shows a rapt self-absorption and a narcissistic turn of mind, which is doubtless why she’s a big feminist heroine.
What I’d like to know, if anyone does, is whether Davis’s custody claim was resisted. And if so, I’d like to know why a court awarded custody of a stepchild to Davis. And yes, he comes out of this very well–raising and taking responsibility for a stepchild.
Incidentally, Davis became a big heroine for filibustering a bill that according to at least one poll, was supported by sixty percent of Texas women. Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc, I guess, which is why i can’t understand why if a majority of Texas women supported the bill it was part of the “war on women.”
I read that it was actually the noise of the protesters that stopped the voting after she finished the filibuster.
I don’t know what poll they refer to, but my guess is that is was one that concentrated in Austin and/or Houston, which have much more leftist tendencies. And, as we all know, the wording of the questions, as well as the interpretation of the data, makes a huge difference. I personally put very little weight to polls.
If you don’t take care of your own family you will be of no public service to the rest of us.
Well said Sally! Well said!
Real mothers NEVER throw their children down the river for their own selfish gain.
Unlike Wendy.
A long time ago the LA Times had a story in their Sunday Magazine section, which had lots of human interest stories, about a married man with two young daughters who decided to have a sex-change operation, become a woman, and start a new “fulfilled” life.
He talked about taking his two daughters to the park for what he knew would be the last time (I think they were around 5-7 years old), tears streaming down his face. He would never see them again.
At the end of the story, now some 20+ years later, he’s contacting them on the phone, hoping to get together with them. The now young adult daughters agonize over whether to meet with him or politely decline.
I remember thinking that if I were one of the daughters I would have said, “Go to hell and stay there.”
Abandoning your kids for some kind of self-fulfillment, or self-actualization or whatever is just disgusting to me.
If God were to come down and order me to choose between giving up sex for life or giving up my kids, I’d immediately say, “Goodbye sex!” without a moment’s hesitation.
If he said I had to choose between losing my legs and arms and losing my kids, I’d say “Goodbye limbs and digits!” without a second thought.
Abandoning your children for career ambition? She’s disgusting.
When you bring children into this world, your wants and needs take a backseat to theirs. I don’t care how boring, or stressful, or unfulfilling that makes you feel about your own life. Tough tamales.
Your main role in life then becomes that of a parent. Wendy Davis willingly aborted that responsibility.
She’s disgusting. And I say that about fathers who abandon their children, too.
While I agree with you, there is a corollary that you overlook. How many parents constructively abandon their children in favor of their careers? Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle” describes a very common situation. The two-income family only exacerbates the situation.
Sadly, in my experience in the clergy, I have seen too many victims of this problem.
But, of course, a stay-at-home mother is to be reviled and/or pitied for her poor choice. Or stay-at-home father.
Because my income is modest and we live in a very expensive area and my wife is a stay-at-home mother, we are paycheck-to-paycheck.
Our money situation is a source of constant stress. But both my wife and I want her at home with the kids.
It’s my fault I wasn’t more serious about school and career when I was younger, but it’s just too late for that now.
But our kids are happy and healthy (knock on wood), and as depressed as I always am for having ended up like this, always struggling financially, with no accomplishments in life to speak of, I try to take comfort that my children will benefit from my having learned from my own disastrous mistakes.
Today is my first day off in over a week and I’d like to do some trading. That’s the only hobby I have. I’ve given up all other hobbies to save money. I love trading. But my wife has used my brokerage account as an ATM and now all I can do is nickel-and-dime trading.
She used the money for our kids. For their weekly classes at a Kumon-style private math cram school, for obscenely expensive, seemingly semi-pro sports team memberships (our daughter had better get a full college scholarship for the fortune we’re spending on her volleyball, and ditto our son with his lacrosse) so, bitch and moan as I do, I can’t complain.
What I can complain about is, desperately searching for a second job just to use the money to replenish my brokerage account to give me more wiggle room to work with … I get turned down by a burger chain for a half-time job as a janitor!
Little do they know, they just passed over a potential janitor whose OCD cleanliness would’ve resulted in a place so clean their customers would’ve been able to eat off the restroom floors with no worry. Those floors and toilets would’ve been sparkling.
I guess the unintended moral of the story I’ve arrived at is … abandon your kids before you’re completely miserable and reduced to applying for work as a janitor.
You need to read MLK’s remarks to Barratt Jr. High in Philly; there is noting wrong with work, and you know that.
” If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.”
Thanks for posting that, 9thDistrictNeighbor. That’s how I think—how I’ve always thought—but I could never say it so beautifully. I’ve copied and saved that.
I don’t care if someone is cleaning toilets or picking up the trash. If they try to do their best at it, I have complete respect for them. Who am I to judge how they ended up that way? Horrible luck … family problems … low IQ in the crapshoot of birth … all I care about is good character. I’m sure many of my former classmates, when they think of me, think, “How the hell did he end up like that? He went nowhere in life.”
I just can’t believe I got turned down. I also got turned down at the nearest supermarket. Can’t they see I’m not some flaky, lazy, impolite kid and I’ll eagerly hustle and break my ass to do the best job they could ever imagine?
All I want is a second job that works with my full-time job schedule so I can save some money, replenish my brokerage account somewhat, and then make my fortune trading options.
Is that too much to ask before I abandon my money-sucking kids and wife? I just wanna trade a little and I’m willing to clean toilets to do it! Customers would be able to eat off those toilets dagnabit!
LukeHandCool (who will hit the pavement searching for work again today. If the last Emperor of China was at peace ending up a simple gardener, Luke feels no shame cleaning toilets, even if his children are horrified at the thought of their friends or their friends’ parents finding out. That would be known as “pay back” to the little money-sucking brats … Ha ha ha!!)
Keep the faith. My husband came home this evening to say that a very close friend, who had been let go from IBM six months ago, had finally found a job. He matches his old salary and he doesn’t have to move. He’s got one kid in college. He’s approaching the half-century mark. It’s been really tough…very demoralizing. We are all very thankful.
Kings speech was called “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?” He made the speech not long before he was assassinated. There’s a snippet of it on YouTube— listen, he’s an amazing speaker.
Thanks for the links. And thanks again for the quote. That’s my new favorite.
That should be emblazoned in numerous places around every high school.
Too many couples work two jobs because they cherish material things so much. It’s possible to do without and still be happy.
About janitorial work: our country, due to prosperity, has become snobbish about work. Everyone wants the glamour, no one wants the grunt work. Now that our prosperity has in large measure dissipated (sp?), it would be nice if our snobbish attitude would dissipate also.
I find it very annoying to hire someone, usually a receptionist, and they resent emptying the trash. Or they refuse to notice it needs done.
I have a friend who resents that he cleaned stalls in summer during college. But to me, that kind of experience is some of the best you can have. You learn so many things, such as you’re not the prince or princess you think you are. It teaches you to appreciate your money, because it is so hard-earned.
My Dad was born in 1915. He died a couple of years ago, at age 96. He worked until he was 89 years old. You’ll never guess what he did. Never.
When I was a kid, in the 60s, he travelled in the northeast states, flying in his own plane from airport to airport to sell aircraft repair shops on purchasing repair work to airplane engines from his company. He did this until about 1971. Then the business started doing not so well, and he quit.
We moved south to Georgia, and he and Mom looked into many things, to start their own business. He couldn’t get a decent job flying because of his age by that time.
After fits and starts, he started a janitorial business. He cleaned businesses in town. A few times, some of us kids would go help. Then he started selling cleaning supplies, too. Then he started cleaning parking lots. Built his own trucks. He built his own trucks.
So at age 89, he was going out in trucks, at night, sweeping parking lots, emptying those big strip mall trash cans, and all the other physical labor it entailed.
Modern Americans are clueless. You have a job, you appreciate it affords you an income. You’re not too good to work, to support yourself. You do what it takes.
My Dad never complained, although he was always hoping for more lots to clean, and to find more efficient ways to do it.
Beautiful!
As the nation has grown more degreed, people do disdain the dirty jobs. I’ve seen the same problem in Asia. I’ve a young friend who looks down his unemployed nose at another friend of mine. He has a degree in English from the local big university. She never went to university. Instead, she’s worked like a dog for years. She sold hot food and made money off of that cuz customers liked the taste and flocked. Wanting more, she got a small shop and began selling drinks, cigarettes, and such. To this she added breakfast food and drink.
The degreed guy, when I told him he should ask her for help and advice, looked down his unemployed nose and sneered at her shop remarking, “but it’s a small shop.” He didn’t care that that small shop paid the freight for her to open two other small ones, which she gave to her stepson and daughter; paid for two apartments and a pretty good lifestyle; bolstered her bank account big time; and will pay for her daughter to finish high school in the USA.
The degreed guy graduated expecting a plum government job, which has failed to materialize because he lacks enough connections and his skills are subpar. Now he says he’s going to start his own dirty job: he’s going to open a small food place, so he’ll be mopping and sweeping soon.
Thanks so much for sharing your father’s story, Karen.
I said somewhere in another post that my favorite reading is reading biographies.
I really enjoyed reading your post about your father. Every time I read something like that I take a little bit of it with me. That was beautiful.
Go easy on yourself. Hellfire, if you had gotten all that education you regret not having you might be in a job where you didn’t have the time to entertain, enlighten and thrill us with your thoughtful and well reasoned writing. I find reading your comments well worth my time. I teach high school math. I know two PhDs in Mathematics who never bothered to graduate from high school. Thanks for your many insightful comments, and don’t worry about what did and didn’t happen in the past.
Thanks for the compliments, Milwaukee. Actually, I do have quite a bit of education under my belt … a master’s degree and 95% of the way to another master’s.
But that does me no good. I’m not good at life. About the only thing in life I’m good at is taking tests. Outside of that, I’m lost.
And back at ya … I do enjoy reading Milwaukee posts.
There is a difference between getting money to put food on the table and roof over their heads and using children as pawns in your life’s gamble for money and power.
“Deborah Wasserman Schultz, who (according to a recent New York Times blog) manages to do plenty with her 9-year-old and 13-year-old twins over the course of a weekend at home.”
Wow–so DWS had twins born four years apart? No wonder she’s so unpleasant!
Lololo
Considering her family history, it is no coincidence that Davis is bullish on abortion.
No, Ann, Amber was 21 and Dru was a freshman in high school. The bigger thing for me is that she left an 8 y/o and a 2 y/o while she went to Harvard. Who does that?
I once had an acquaintance at work who left her two little boys to pursue a prestigious job on the transplant team as a co-ordinator. She also found herself a doctor to go along with the fancy title. I never thought of her the same after that. Oh, she had visitation and would take them occasionally – one time I attended one of the boy’s birthday parties, held at a local pizza parlor. She got a call and came over and asked me if I would take the boys home – I was not a close friend, just an acquaintance, mind you. I took the boys home and I’ll never forget the look on the daddy’s face when a complete stranger pulled up with his boys in the back of her car. His only question for me was, “Who are you and where is their mother?” I was ashamed – don’t know why I should have felt ashamed but I did.
Her decision to move to Massachusetts to attend Harvard is odd, especially with two young daughters. Why not attend a Texas law school? After all, she lived in Texas, her husband’s business was in Texas, her kids were in Texas, and she presumably planned to return to Texas and practice law there, so why not choose a law school closer to home? It’s not as if there were no quality law schools in Texas. It almost seems as if she had something else in mind . . . .
There’s a report that she took the kids with her for a while but couldn’t cope so she brought them back home. Which brings me to the same questions you ask.
Oh, while at Harvard, she got very active in some radical feminist group. Maybe the schools in TX didn’t have that.
Whatever, she was running like hell from her parents, the trailer park, her husband, and her kids. Like the woman in Joanne’s story, her personal ambitions trumped fidelity and family.
I’d be curious to know if she horned her husband before or after she got the face and boob jobs done. Some plain people can’t believe how good they look after plastic surgery and just run wild in their hot new body wanting to be reassured everybody loves them like they love themselves.
Most Americans instinctively oppose normalization of bad choices. Hopefully she will not win the vulnerable vote, and the greedy and corrupt vote will be insufficient to realize her political dreams.
Leaving her children, plus substance abuse and adultery…. Wendy is not the sort of person I would want to run my State.
For once, I agree with Ann Coulter: “Hey — maybe Jeff Davis should run for governor! He’s the one who raised two kids, including a stepdaughter, while holding down a job and paying for his wife’s law school. There’s a hard-luck story!”
Plus, he had to sell the business he began, to pay her off in the divorce.
Gold digger, pure and simple.
It appears that Saint Wendy also cashed-in when the divorce resulted in the sale of the title company he started!
Sorry – posted before I saw your note.
From what public statements her ex-husband has made, Wendy Davis did as good a job as a mother as the circumstances allowed. But the bottom line is that she did not give priority to her husband, her children, or her marriage, despite whatever promises she had made or vows she had taken, and instead gave it to her own career and political aspirations. One can’t help but guess what priority her oath of office and her duty to the state would hold should she be elected Governor.
1. “Americans will forgive a lot in a politician. But a woman who leaves her kids is just beyond the pale.”
I think that’s still correct but wouldn’t bet the ranch.
2. Even if Davis has no future in elected office, she has a cushy one in politics via professorships, foundations, etc.
3. And she has a great future as a leftist martyr.
She was tormented to leave her children, you see. Her biopic will flop at the box office but sweep the Academy Awards. The key scene: Davis visits an orphanage she is “fighting” for and realizes that there are so many children who need her help that seeking custody of her kids would be selfish. When the Evil White Males falsify her sacrifice, she becomes martyred Joan of Arc.
4. It won’t surprise me if the Davis people will try the foregoing shtick in her campaign.
(5. Btw, were there, um, imprecidsions in Davis’s Harvard application? And did Harvard care?)
Think of it as Wendy’s Too Late Term Abortion
Democrats went beyond the pale long ago. My money is that they love her and will vote for her. She’s a hero.
But the bottom line is that she did not give priority to her husband, her children, or her marriage, despite whatever promises she had made or vows she had taken,
Hmmm, sounds like some Congress Critters I know! Maybe she is the perfect candidate!
She abandoned the children that she had so that she could ultimately filibuster so that other women could kill their children.
I hope that her children see her for the craven monster that she is and not spend any time trying to figure out how it was their fault that they were abandoned by their mother.
Wendy Davis thought that her little schtick would bring her fame and fortune – all she’s accomplished is putting her face upon the evil that is the Democrat Party.
And I hope that she finds salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, renounces abortion, and does everything in her power to make it up to her children all the neglect that she heaped upon them. That would be a story of redemption that I could stand up for.
Grinding your enemy beneath your heel is so Old Testament. Paul was responsible for the death of quite a few viable tissue masses before the road to Demascus, and he wound up being the most prolific of Christ’s inspired authors.
“Americans will forgive a lot in a politician. But a woman who leaves her kids is just beyond the pale.”
I would like to believe that. But keep in mind that Ted Kennedy – whose negligence caused the death of a woman – was repeatedly re-elected. William Jefferson Clinton sexually assaulted several women, and twice won the Presidency. Barack Obama’s policies created the worst economy since the Great Depression, yet he was re-elected in 2012 and his party increased its strength in both houses in Congress.
Given that context a creep like Wendy Davis is unfortunately not out of the ordinary. She almost certainly will not become the next Governor of Texas. But in other state (New York, California) where the GOP is little more than a pale echo of the Democrat Party she would be hard to beat. People who tolerate the slaughter of children in the holy name of Choice will eventually not care one bit about a mother who simply dumps them on a rich ex-sugar daddy.
yes, but this is not a national election we’re talking about here. it is Texas. she is going to get creamed.
While I understand what you are saying, it would be interesting to see what would actually happen if Schultz’s children got in the way of her pursuing her career.
Unlikely. She has seemingly risen to the level of her incompetency. She is not about to win a Senate seat or governorship any time soon, and that leaves the House. And she doesn’t appear to be ruthless enough to ever be either minority leader or Speaker. So, the US House it is.
I also think that the demographics are against Davis. The biggest growing demographic in TX are the Hispanics who tend to be very pro-family and devotedly Roman Catholic. Not only is Davis anti-family, but made her name nationally by being outspokenly pro-third-trimester-abortion. Combine the two, and I think she will have problems with them, along with some other traditional Dem groups. Sure, a Dem may ultimately win statewide in TX, but not an anti-family, pro late term abortion one, at least not, I suspect, any time soon.
Is it just me, or does she have really, really ugly legs?
They go with her personality.
Not just her legs,
but ugly all over.
Those shoes are pretty ugly, too!
An ego the size of Wendy Davis’ cannot even comprehend the meaning of another person. In her aura there is no love, no sharing, no understanding, and for sure no compassion. Not all but I’m sure the majority of women and working women who became mothers learned there were times – necessary times – to suppress the ego and witness their children discovering life. It’s call parenting. Ms. Davis represents a heartless, manic, driven female who cannot be trusted to make judgements for others. Her agenda is booked with herself.
Yep. Wendy Davis with her silly pink shoes was the media’s cause celebre … really, these are the people who ostensibly decry “greed” (and what is greedier than putting your political ambitions above—far above—your own children?) and shallow symbolism and materialism (like expensive brand pink running shoes).
Same people who divine sinister ulterior motives for Sarah Palin choosing to give birth to her son with Down syndrome.
The leftist news media these days is little more than a reality show parody.
So, given that she dropped her own flesh & blood like they were LSD at a Phish concert when they became inconvenient to her ambitions, how far do you think her constituents and political allies can trust her to stand with them when the going gets rough?