Alice Walton Didn’t Endorse Craig James

Last week Tim noted the news that the Wal-Mart heiress endorsed Craig James in his run for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate, but now Alice Walton says she did no such thing. She’s endorsed Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst for the job. The James campaign has set the video that they’d been using as proof of the endorsement to private on YouTube. Robert Garrett of the Morning News describes what it contained:

In fact, the video, as I noted last week, has very bad background noise and is hard to make out. The campaign’s on-screen snippets of transcript, purporting to be what Walton said, were not entirely reliable. However, toward the end of the 86-second video, she can be heard saying, “You’re my friend and I’m going to support you” — though it’s not clear in what context she said that.

I’ve asked the James campaign to reactivate the video — out of “respect” for readers, who ought to be able to listen to what’s become a campaign issue. Listening and viewing, though, probably won’t help them sort out the mess. It’s clear that the videographer, who’s holding a camera of some kind in Walton’s direction, is making her uneasy. Supposedly, the video was shot in the kitchen of a Fort Worth residence where a James fundraiser was held a few weeks back. And it’s clear that James is, for lack of a better word, sucking up to her, big-time.