AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Details of a new television ad from Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott.
TITLE: “Garage”
LENGTH: 30 seconds
AIRING: Statewide in both English and Spanish
KEY IMAGE: Attorney General Greg Abbott, wearing workout clothes, is seen sweating heavily as he rolls his wheelchair up an empty, multi-level parking garage in Dallas. He says in a voiceover, “After my accident, I had to rebuild my strength” and recalls physical rehabilitation where he repeatedly rolled his chair up an eight-story parking garage. Abbott says he was always pushing himself to go up another level: “Just one more.” The closing shot is Abbott at the top of the garage, gazing into Dallas’ night cityscape and promising he’ll govern Texas that way.
Abbott was 26 in 1984, when a falling oak tree crushed his spine while he was jogging in Houston. He has collected more than $5 million so far as part of a settlement from a lawsuit he filed after the accident.
ANALYSIS: Abbott is trying to become the nation’s first elected governor in a wheelchair since 1982, when Alabama’s George Wallace won his final term. Abbott hasn’t shied away from his accident, even formally kicking off his gubernatorial campaign last summer by declaring, “Some politicians talk about having a spine of steel. I actually have one.” In his stump speeches, Abbott also likes to joke, “I know what you’re thinking, ‘How slowly was that guy running to have a tree fall on him?'”
But Abbott’s campaign says the spot highlights not his accident but his perseverance after a freak setback that could have derailed an otherwise rising legal star. A former state Supreme Court justice, Abbott has been Texas attorney general since late 2002. What the ad doesn’t mention, though, is critics’ charges of hypocrisy since Abbott has long since become a fierce critic of trial lawyers and large awards handed out by juries in civil cases — despite the settlement after his own accident that made him a millionaire.
Abbott’s Democratic opponent, state Sen. Wendy Davis, has used a recent ad campaign of her own, meanwhile, to attack Abbott for not siding with a rape victim while serving as judge in the 1990s. Davis spokeswoman Rebecca Acuna said that when she heard the title “Garage,” she thought the spot would be an apology “to the woman he sided against on the Texas Supreme Court after she was brutally raped in a parking garage.” That was a reference to Abbott’s opinion making it more difficult for victims to sue property owners after a 1999 case where an off-duty Houston police officer abducted a woman at 3 a.m. and sexually assaulted her in a parking garage.
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Online:
Link to ad: http://bit.ly/1tqZZWv
