Wendy Davis is not backing down after her campaign released a widely condemned ad featuring a prolonged, ominous shot of an empty wheelchair. (Davis’s Republican opponent, Greg Abbott, is a paraplegic.)
On Monday, Davis’s campaign organized a press conference in an effort to prove that some of her best friends are confined to wheelchairs. "Greg Abbott got his justice. Why doesn’t he believe that a rape survivor or a person with a disability or a victim paralyzed forever…should get justice too?" Davis said. "What makes Greg Abbott think it’s okay to deny them, his fellow Texans, the justice that he rightly went to court to receive?"
But things got a little awkward at one point when one of the disabled speakers was dragged across the stage in a chair by (presumably) a member of the Davis campaign.
Davis currently trails Abbott by double digits.
UPDATE: The man in the video, Lamar White, Jr., responds, via the Houston Chronicle:
"I’m clumsy, and I fall sometimes. I didn’t want to fall on camera, so I personally asked them to slide me over in the chair," said Lamar White, Jr., who has cerebral palsy. "I asked them to move me. Because I was worried that if I stood up, I’d fall down on camera."
White, a law student in his final year at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School, had just finished detailing why he supports Democratic nominee for governor Sen. Wendy Davis when a campaign staffer slid the chair out of the way of the microphone so they next attendee could speak...
"These critics have obviously never met someone with cerebral palsy before," added White, who can walk and drive a car independently. "Our movements are awkward. It’s part of the condition."