Can Wendy Davis Have It All?

Wendy Davis, who is running for governor of Texas, has been attacked over questions about her biography. (Jeff Brown for The New York Times)

By ROBERT DRAPER, NYT, FEB. 12, 2014

One sunny Friday morning in late January, Wendy Davis took me on a two-hour tour of the life she led just a decade or so ago, back when she was a city councilwoman and the world knew nothing of her or the pink running shoes she wore during her epic filibuster, or her ambition to be elected this November as a Democratic governor in the deeply Republican state of Texas, or the way her parenting has become a point of debate in whether she’s a suitable candidate for that office. We were in Fort Worth, where Davis, who is a state senator, has lived for about 35 of her 50 years, most in utter obscurity. When she joined the City Council in 1999, she was only the third-most-prominent Wendy Davis in town (the other two were socialites), and to the extent that community leaders knew her at all, it was as the wife of Jeff Davis, an attorney and former city councilman, whose civic passions would spark her own. Once that fire was lit, everything would later change for her — for her marriage, for her city, for Texas and, who knows, perhaps even for a national Democratic Party in search of a post-Obama non-Hillary superstar.

Seated behind the wheel of her black Tahoe hybrid S.U.V., Davis was wearing a fitted black dress and high heels and an omnipresent half-smile that could be interpreted as both drowsy and sly. She slowed whenever we came upon a structure or a street that bore her imprint, which seemed to happen every two or three minutes. “None of this was here just a few years ago,” Davis said at one point. There was the gleaming West Seventh Street Corridor — formerly a nowhereland of rusted grain elevators and railroad tracks, now one of the most vibrant commercial strips in the city. (One of the area’s developers, Kirk Williams, told me: “Wendy said: ‘We need this on the west side. How can I help?’ ”) There was the Paris Coffee Shop, a working-class institution that nearly lost its building until Davis intervened. (“She went above and beyond; I needed her, she knew that, and to this day I appreciate what she did for me,” said the shop’s owner, Mike Smith.) There was the former site of the Ripley Arnold Place housing project, whose predominantly black tenants Davis worked to relocate after the property was sold — several of them to a white community near a country club, which provoked hysteria and threats against her, though in the end the new residents blended in easily with the old. (“She showed political courage, being willing to tackle issues that others would not,” Fernando Costa, the planning director at the time, said of the episode.)

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