From staff and wire reports 
 
 Wendy Davis’ campaign clarified details of her biography Monday after a Dallas Morning News report raised questions about details that she and supporters have highlighted in her race for governor. 
 
 Davis’ critics said Monday that the discrepancies suggest her past is not quite as inspirational as she has lead Texans to believe. 
 
 Matt Hirsch, a spokesman for likely Republican nominee Greg Abbott, said in a written statement Monday that Davis had “systematically, intentionally and repeatedly deceived Texans for years about her background, yet she expects voters to indulge her fanciful narrative.” 
 
 Davis, a senator from Fort Worth, criticized Abbott’s team for issuing what she called a personal attack. 
 
 “We’re not surprised by Greg Abbott’s campaign attacks on the personal story of my life as a single mother who worked hard to get ahead,” she said in a written statement. “But they won’t work, because my story is the story of millions of Texas women who know the strength it takes when you’re young, alone and a mother.” 
 
 The News reported Sunday that Davis was 21 – not 19, as stated in her online Senate biography —when her first marriage ended in divorce. Also, Davis and her daughter Amber lived just a few months in her family’s mobile home. 
 
 In an interview with The News last week, Davis acknowledged errors in what she and aides have said about her life story. 
 
 Meanwhile, another potential question about Davis’ past comes from the Facebook page of her mother, Ginger Cornstubble, which references attending Muleshoe High School in West Texas. That contradicts a 2012 suggestion by Davis that her mother had just a sixth grade education. 
 
 The Davis campaign said Monday that her mother “had attended school only into the ninth grade.” ||||| Now that key details of Wendy Davis’s oft-celebrated rags-to-riches story have been exposed as less than accurate, how have the media decided to report on the revelations? 
 
 Well, most outlets have treated her admitted fabrications as news, although some have been noticeably generous in their framing of the issue. “Wendy Davis tells a fuller version of her rags-to-riches story,” CBS News tweeted on Monday. CNN observed that Davis’s life story is now “more complicated” than the “compelling narrative” she had originally presented. MSNBC was quick to cast the story from an anti-GOP angle: “Right pounces on news that Wendy Davis embellished life story,” a familiar position from which to launch the inevitable follow-up: “Will Republicans overreach?” 
 
 According to MSNBC, the real reason conservatives “pounced” on the story is that they loathe Davis for “making life choices they disagree with — including the decision, as a mother, to prioritize her career.” And adding to the charge of sexism, MSNBC adds, “It’s hard to imagine those choices generating criticism were Wendy Davis a man.” Which raises a number of interesting questions, such as: Would disgraced former MSNBC host Martin Bashir have condoned the defecation into the mouth of a male politician? 
 
 (On a side note: Several stories have used the phrase “blurred lines” lines to describe Davis’s “fuller” and “more complicated” backstory, which probably isn’t the best phrase to apply to Davis the feminist superhero, given that feminists slammed the hit song “Blurred Lines” for being “rape-y.”) 
 
 Meanwhile, Politico, which has a tendency to turn even the most mundane political development into a 600-word article, waited almost 48 hours to publish its first story on the revelations — an interview with Davis, who “swung back . . . at swirling questions about her personal life.” 
 
 The New York Times appears to have little interest in the story of Davis’s deceptions, despite the paper’s fawning coverage of her late-night filibuster to block a proposed ban on late-term abortions in the Texas legislature and her role as “the Democrats’ big hope” to win the state’s governorship for the first time in nearly two decades. 
 
 Of course, the Times was not the only major media outlet to run glowing profiles of Davis in the wake of her dramatic filibuster last June. CNN touted her “long history of persisting against tough odds.” Vogue published a 3,000-word profile in which Davis, according to a Washington Post write-up of the piece, proclaimed her status as a “cool mom.” 
 
 Jeff Zeleny of ABC News interviewed Davis with all the scrutiny of a giddy contest winner meeting his celebrity crush for the first time. Nearly half of his questions were about the famous pink running shoes Davis wore during the filibuster. In fairness to Zeleny, this was perfectly in keeping with most media coverage at the time. 
 
 “Why did you decide to wear your running shoes?” Zeleny asked. “Let’s take a look at those, they’ve kind of been rocketing around the Internet.” 
 
 “Is this a pink?” he inquired while examining the actual shoes during the interview. “I would call it a pink or a salmon pink,” she helpfully informed listeners. Davis was also a runner in real life, the reporter made sure to note: “I mean, these are legitimate running shoes.” 
 
 Like most mainstream reporters who interviewed the rising political star, Zeleny neglected to discuss the particulars of the abortion bill in question, or note that polling on the issue shows strong majority support for the type of late-term-abortion ban that Davis fought so hard to block. 
 
 Obviously, abortion is a controversial topic, one that constantly comes up in political discourse. But while Republicans are constantly asked about their “controversial” positions, Democrats are rarely pressed to expound on their own views. John McCormack of The Weekly Standard may be the only reporter in the country who consistently confronts Democrats, including Wendy Davis, with tough questions about abortion; when he does, fellow reporters find it cause for laughter. 
 
 In the ABC interview with Zeleny, Davis repeated a false claim she made under oath in 2012, and has made on numerous occasions since: that she was 19 years old when she divorced her first husband. She was actually 21. Other fabrications uncovered by Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News include the fact that Davis’s second husband, Jeff Davis, helped pay for her tuition at Texas Christian University and Harvard Law School, in part by cashing in his 401(k) and taking out a loan. Davis’s website states that she financed her education “with the help of academic scholarships and student loans.” Jeff Davis told Slater that the relationship ended almost immediately after he made the final payment on the Harvard Law School loan. “It was ironic,” he said. “I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left.” 
 
 As David Freddoso points out, Slater’s story comes a week after an NBC Today Show interview (with Maria Shriver) that played heavily on Davis’s “personal story of struggle and success.” The interview even staged a scene at the trailer park where Davis had lived for some time, though not under the circumstances that her original narrative implied. 
 
 These fabrications do not negate the impressive nature of Davis’s life story and rise to prominence from humble beginnings, nor are they the sort of egregious falsehoods that have ended political careers. Do they suggest that Davis is a self-aggrandizing politician who frequently fudges the truth? A number of pundits thought this was an appropriate question to ask about Paul Ryan in 2012 after he fudged his marathon time and criticized President Obama’s opposition to the Simpson-Bowles plan without mentioning that he also voted against it. Davis, who has described herself as pro-life, recently claimed to have outraised her Republican opponent, Greg Abbott, in the second half of 2013, even though the actual figures paint a “more complicated” picture. 
 
 If anything, the fact that we are only just learning the “fuller version” of Davis’s biography says less about her than it does about the media that have lavished her with adoring coverage over the past six months. But as Slater writes, the story is relevant because Davis “has made her personal story of struggle and success a centerpiece of her campaign” for governor. So why did it take so long to poke holes in her story? 
 
 — Andrew Stiles is a political reporter for National Review Online. ||||| FORT WORTH — Wendy Davis has made her personal story of struggle and success a centerpiece of her campaign to become the first Democrat elected governor of Texas in almost a quarter-century. 
 
 While her state Senate filibuster last year captured national attention, it is her biography — a divorced teenage mother living in a trailer who earned her way to Harvard and political achievement — that her team is using to attract voters and boost fundraising. 
 
 The basic elements of the narrative are true, but the full story of Davis’ life is more complicated, as often happens when public figures aim to define themselves. In the shorthand version that has developed, some facts have been blurred. 
 
 Davis was 21, not 19, when she was divorced. She lived only a few months in the family mobile home while separated from her husband before moving into an apartment with her daughter. 
 
 A single mother working two jobs, she met Jeff Davis, a lawyer 13 years older than her, married him and had a second daughter. He paid for her last two years at Texas Christian University and her time at Harvard Law School, and kept their two daughters while she was in Boston. When they divorced in 2005, he was granted parental custody, and the girls stayed with him. Wendy Davis was directed to pay child support. 
 
 In an extensive interview last week, Davis acknowledged some chronological errors and incomplete details in what she and her aides have said about her life. 
 
 “My language should be tighter,” she said. “I’m learning about using broader, looser language. I need to be more focused on the detail.” 
 
 All campaigns seek to cast their candidate in the most positive light and their opponent in less flattering terms. Davis is presenting her story on websites, interviews, speeches and campaign videos. Last week, NBC’s Today show became the latest media outlet to showcase the story of Davis’ difficult early years in a flattering piece. 
 
 Using her story to inspire new voters, particularly women, youths and minorities, is a key part of the campaign’s strategy to overcome the state’s heavy Republican bent. 
 
 But likely Republican nominee Greg Abbott and his allies are expected to focus on different details to tell voters a competing story. Some will question how much of her success was her own doing, and how bad her circumstances were to start. 
 
 Davis defended the accuracy of her overall account as a young single mother who escaped poverty, earned an education and built a successful legal and political career through hard work and determination. 
 
 “Most people would identify with the fact that we tend to be defined by the struggles we came through than by the successes. And certainly for me that’s true,” she said, sitting in her campaign office in Fort Worth. “When I think about who I am and how it’s reflected in the things I worked on, it comes from that place.” 
 
 ‘Texas success story’ 
 
 The candidate’s compelling life story begins with 14-year-old Wendy Russell working to help support her single mother in Tarrant County. While still a teenager, Davis married, had a child and divorced, she has said. 
 
 “I had a baby. I got divorced by the time I was 19 years old,” she testified in a recent federal lawsuit over redistricting. “After I got divorced, I lived in a mobile home park in southeast Fort Worth.” 
 
 As a working mother raising a daughter, Davis enrolled in Tarrant County Community College. 
 
 “With the help of academic scholarships and student loans, Wendy not only became the first person in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree but graduated first in her class and was accepted to Harvard Law School,” her website says. 
 
 She won a seat on the Fort Worth City Council and later moved to the Texas Senate. Last June, her 11-hour filibuster against abortion regulations made her a champion of women’s health care and propelled her candidacy for governor. 
 
 “I’m a Texas success story,” Davis told NBC. “I am the epitome of hard work and optimism.” 
 
 There’s no question Davis struggled financially. When her parents separated, her father, Jerry Russell, started a sandwich shop and fledgling dinner theater. 
 
 “While he lived that passion, he never made money again and was never able to comply with the terms of my parents’ divorce,” she said. “What it meant for us financially is that things ... completely turned upside down, and it was a real struggle. My brothers and I went to work young — and it was out of necessity, not about wanting to have a little bit of spending money.” 
 
 She was 17 and still in high school when she moved in with her boyfriend, a construction worker named Frank Underwood. She got pregnant, married and “some time between [age] 19 and 20 was when Frank and I separated,” she said. 
 
 Davis remained in the mobile home a few months, then moved in with her mother before getting her own apartment. She got custody of her daughter, Amber, and Underwood was ordered to pay child support. 
 
 Under terms of the divorce, he got a boat, the mobile home and the responsibility for the mortgage on it. She got a 3-year-old Pontiac Grand Prix, a 1972 Firebird and a 1967 Chevy pickup. Davis was 21. 
 
 Second chapters 
 
 A few months later, she enrolled at the local community college. The idea came from a nurse at the pediatrician’s office where she was working as a receptionist. 
 
 Four nights a week, Davis was also waiting tables at her father’s Fort Worth dinner theater, Stage West. It was there that she met her future husband, Jeff Davis, a 34-year-old friend of her father’s. 
 
 “One day at the end of a meeting, Jerry asked, ‘How do you like younger women? My daughter wants to go out with you,’” Jeff Davis said in an interview. “I was flattered so I took her out. We dated two or three years, then got married.” 
 
 While they dated, Wendy Davis enrolled at Texas Christian University on an academic scholarship and a Pell Grant. After they married, when she was 24, they moved into a historic home in the Mistletoe Heights neighborhood of Fort Worth. 
 
 Jeff Davis paid for her final two years at TCU. “It was community resources. We paid for it together,” Wendy Davis said. 
 
 When she was accepted to Harvard Law School, Jeff Davis cashed in his 401(k) account and eventually took out a loan to pay for her final year there. 
 
 “I was making really good money then, well over six figures,” he said. “But when you’ve got someone at Harvard, you’ve got bills to pay, you’ve got two small kids. The economy itself was marginal. You do what you have to do, no big deal.” 
 
 The daughters, then 8 and 2, remained with Jeff Davis in Fort Worth while Wendy Davis was at Harvard. 
 
 “Harvard really impressed her with a different culture of energy, really bright young people. That was something she would like to be around. She just enjoys that culture,” Jeff Davis said. 
 
 Wendy Davis agreed. “It expanded my perspectives tremendously,” she said. “I went to school with some of the brightest people in the country, and I learned tremendously.” 
 
 Political player 
 
 After she graduated from Harvard in 1993, Wendy Davis started her own law practice and worked with her husband at the title company he founded. They enrolled their younger daughter, Dru, at Fort Worth Country Day School, a prestigious private school. 
 
 Jeff Davis had once served on the Fort Worth City Council, and Wendy Davis expressed interest in running for a seat in 1996. 
 
 “I opened some doors for her with people, knew how bright she was and knew she’d do a good job,” he said. 
 
 She lost in 1996 but ran again two years later and won. The council seats were nonpartisan but in terms of voting, she was a Republican. Davis said she voted in GOP primaries because she supported mayor and congressional candidate Kay Granger, a Republican, and as a lawyer, she wanted to have a say in selecting judicial nominees in a county where the judges were often Republicans. 
 
 Over time, the Davises’ marriage was strained. In November 2003, Wendy Davis moved out. 
 
 Jeff Davis said that was right around the time the final payment on their Harvard Law School loan was due. “It was ironic,” he said. “I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left.” 
 
 Wendy Davis said that as a lawyer, she contributed too. 
 
 “I was a vibrant part of contributing to our family finances from the time I graduated to the time we separated in 2003,” she said. “The idea that suddenly there was this instantaneous departure after Jeff had partnered so beautifully with me in putting me through school is just absurd.” 
 
 In his initial divorce filing, Jeff Davis said the marriage had failed, citing adultery on her part and conflicts that the couple could not overcome. The final court decree makes no mention of infidelity, granting the divorce solely “on the ground of insupportability.” 
 
 Amber was 21 and in college. Dru was in ninth grade. Jeff Davis was awarded parental custody. Wendy Davis was ordered to pay $1,200 a month in child support. 
 
 “She did the right thing,” he said. “She said, ‘I think you’re right; you’ll make a good, nurturing father. While I’ve been a good mother, it’s not a good time for me right now.’” 
 
 Wendy Davis declined to discuss the circumstances or terms of the divorce. 
 
 “When I decided to run for governor, I promised my girls we would not revisit a time that was terribly difficult for them,” she said. “I will tell you it was very important to me that Dru stay in her childhood home. It was a very difficult time in our life.” 
 
 She said: “I very willingly, as part of my divorce settlement, paid child support. That was at my request, not any court telling me I needed to financially support my daughters.” 
 
 A former colleague and political supporter who worked closely with Davis when she was on the council said the body’s work was very time-consuming. 
 
 “Wendy is tremendously ambitious,” he said, speaking only on condition of anonymity in order to give what he called an honest assessment. “She’s not going to let family or raising children or anything else get in her way.” 
 
 He said: “She’s going to find a way, and she’s going to figure out a way to spin herself in a way that grabs at the heart strings. A lot of it isn’t true about her, but that’s just us who knew her. But she’d be a good governor.” 
 
 Davis’ daughters, now adults, are supporting their mother’s campaign for governor. Both appear in a campaign video on her behalf. 
 
 Jeff Davis said the financial difficulties that Wendy Davis faced before her second marriage were real. 
 
 “A lot of what she says is true,” he said. “When she was 21, it became a little easier for her. The first 21 years were about working one, two and three jobs, trying to get through, raising a kid, driving an old Toyota pickup truck that was the smallest you could find. 
 
 “She got a break,” Jeff Davis said. “Good things happen, opportunities open up. You take them; you get lucky. That’s a better narrative than what they’re trying to paint.” 
 
 Follow Wayne Slater on Twitter at @wayneslater. ||||| 
 
 Wendy Davis speaking at an education meeting in Texas earlier this month. (AP Photo/LM Otero) 
 
 Add Wendy Davis to the long list of politicians (and public figures more broadly) who shave a little here and add a little there, all in an effort to connect with and inspire voters by being both accessible and exceptional. It’s a version of the campaigning in poetry, governing in prose idea. And when it comes to biographical narratives, campaign verses are often written in broad strokes — compelling Horatio Alger-like stories, full of up-from-nowhere Americana. 
 
 They are what literary types call narratives of ascent. In Davis’ retelling of her story, she was the single teenage mom who juggled low-wage jobs, then worked her way to a Harvard Law degree. It’s an inspiring story. Generally true. Yet the details — a lawyer husband who helped her pay for school and take care of her daughters — make it more complicated, less catchy. 
 
 And politics, where being a self-made man or woman is a selling point, is full of these types of bite-sized stories. Often that shorthand way of describing a life doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny, as Davis is finding out. 
 
 Davis, who is running for governor in Texas, and her allies are now pushing back, blaming opponents for a story that appeared in The Dallas Morning News that questioned some of the public details about her life story. She also released an early biography that clarifies and fleshes out her early years. 
 
 Again, she’s in good company. 
 
 Remember Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)? Is he the son of Cuban exiles or Cuban immigrants? 
 
 And Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? Native American ancestry or not? 
 
 Did Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) serve in Vietnam or just say he did? 
 
 Are the characters in President Obama’s memoir real or composite? 
 
 How much did Mitt and Ann Romney actually struggle when they were a young married couple? 
 
 And don’t forget Bill Clinton, the man from Hope. Even that detail, a speech writer’s dream, was a bit more complicated — Clinton was born in Hope, yet spent most of his boyhood in Hot Springs. 
 
 But the man from Hot Springs doesn’t have the same ring to it. 
 
 So for Wendy Davis, so gifted at the optics of politics (remember those pink sneakers and the 11-hour filibuster), now what? What’s clear is that this type of biographical scrutiny has tripped up many a politician. Yet it has hardly doomed anyone. (See the above list). 
 
 For her part, Davis has quickly turned this into a partisan campaign fight with a dash of identity politics, a surefire way to rally the troops. She has crafted a very specific image — blue collar, populist feminist — that has resonated both in Texas and more broadly with the national Democratic base. While her name recognition has increased, she still trails in polls. 
 
 The bottom line is this: People who liked Wendy Davis before the more complicated story of her background emerged will like her all the same. And those that didn’t will have yet another reason to root against her.
– Wendy Davis finds herself at the center of a firestorm this week, after being forced to admit that she'd embellished or omitted some details of what's generally been depicted as an inspiring personal biography. If you've missed the fracas, here are the CliffsNotes: The Original Story: Davis has always said she was divorced at 19, and she raised two daughters in a mobile home, before eventually attending Texas Christian University and then Harvard. But on Sunday the Dallas Morning News reported that Davis actually divorced at 21, not 19, that she lived in the mobile home for only a few months before moving into an apartment, and that she'd soon thereafter gotten a lot of financial help from her second husband, Jeff Davis, who helped her pay for college, and took care of her kids while she attended Harvard. When they divorced, Jeff won custody of the kids, and Wendy was ordered to pay child support. "A lot of what she says is true," Jeff Davis says. "The first 21 years were about working one, two, and three jobs, trying to get through, raising a kid. … She got a break. Good things happen." Davis' Response: "My language should be tighter," Davis acknowledged in an interview with the paper. "I'm learning about using broader, looser language. I need to be more focused on the detail." When likely gubernatorial opponent Greg Abbott released a statement saying she "systematically, intentionally, and repeatedly deceived Texans," Davis responded by saying the attacks wouldn't work "because my story is the story of millions of Texas women who know the strength it takes when you're young, alone, and a mother." The Reaction: "If anything, the fact that we are only just learning the 'fuller version' of Davis' biography says less about her than it does about the media that have lavished her with adoring coverage," writes Andrew Stiles at the National Review, noting how slow some outlets were to report on the story. But these "fabrications" aren't "the sort of egregious falsehoods that have ended political careers." Besides, a host of politicians, from Marco Rubio to Elizabeth Warren, to President Obama himself have run into similar biographical embarrassments, points out Nia-Malika Henderson at the Washington Post. "The bottom line is this: People who liked Wendy Davis before the more complicated story of her background emerged will like her all the same. And those that didn't will have another reason to root against her."