When Rick Perry, who has been the governor of Texas for over a decade, announced last week that he wouldn’t run again, he set off a flurry of speculation about who would replace him next year. Many floated the name of Wendy Davis, the Texas State Senator who claimed the spotlight with her 13-hour filibuster of a behemoth abortion bill, and who seems to have the best shot of becoming the first Democrat to hold statewide office in Texas since 1995. But a week after Perry withdrew his name from the race, it’s already more or less obvious who his successor will be: Greg Abbott, Texas’s longest-serving Attorney General—he first won the post in 2002—who is so clearly his party and Perry’s handpicked favorite that even his Republican opponent has taken to calling him “the anointed one.” Here’s what you need to know about the man who may soon be at the helm of America’s second-largest state.

Man of Steel

Abbott has built his narrative as a politician around the first thing people notice about him: He’s paraplegic, and uses a wheelchair. When Abbott was 26, he went out jogging and was crushed by a falling oak tree. He says he whiled away the months of his recovery by studying politics and politicians, deriving energy from his newfound ambition to be one of them. Today, Abbott, who also lost his father when he was a teen, calls himself a “fighter.” “Some politicians talk about having a steel spine. I actually have one. I will use my steel spine to fight for Texas values every single day,” he said when he launched his campaign for governor Sunday.

Though Abbott’s disability is a big part of his identity—friends say he cracks jokes about his accident, and used to go by “Wheels”—he has been accused of lacking sympathy for others in the same position. In 2003, he unsuccessfully fought the federal Americans with Disabilities Act in court, arguing a section that prohibited public entities from discriminating based on disability was unconstitutional. (Abbott said he was personally for the ADA, and was just doing his job by defending Texas.) This kind of hypocrisy has dogged Abbott in the past. As The Washington Post reports:

The accident became an issue in Abbott’s 2002 race for attorney general, when he criticized his Democratic rival for being a personal injury lawyer. Don Riddle, the lawyer who represented Abbott in his own personal injury suit against the owner of the tree and the company that took care of it, suggested his old client was being a hypocrite. Abbott’s settlement is reported to exceed $10 million.

God, Guns, and Gynos