After Filibuster, a Star Rises in Texas

By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA


NEW YORK — She comes from a key district in North Texas, has a slow twang, battle scars and ferocity of spirit, and after one drama-filled day in the bitter abortion fight in the Texas Legislature, Wendy Davis has become a national political star and charismatic new face of women’s rights.


For 11 hours, in a midday-to-midnight filibuster, Ms. Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat, held forth on the floor of the State Senate last month against a Republican bill severely limiting abortion. Cheered on by a packed gallery and hundreds of other supporters in the halls of the Capitol in Austin (and thousands watching a live stream of the proceedings), the telegenic 50-year-old single mother of two was able to stop the bill — if only, as it turned out, for three weeks.

She was an overnight sensation.

In short order, she pumped life into the moribund Texas Democratic Party, recharged the state’s women’s movement, raised nearly $1 million in two weeks for her re-election campaign and, not least, was beseeched by supporters and some in her party to run for governor in 2014, which might be a quixotic quest in a state that has not elected a Democrat to that office in 20 years.

Now, while she thinks about all that, Ms. Davis is going to Washington. She will be the host of two fund-raisers on Thursday. One, a $500-a-head breakfast at Johnny’s Half Shell, a restaurant on Capitol Hill, will feature House and Senate Democrats including Senators Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York and Barbara Boxer of California. Later, she will be the host of a happy-hour fund-raiser, at $25 to $250 a person, at Local 16 in the hip U Street neighborhood.


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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/us/24iht-letter24.html?src=twr&_r=0