Herschel Walker Looks No Better Now Than He Did in April

In mid-April I wrote a post on Facebook explaining why I believe the Democrats will control the Senate, likely by a somewhat larger margin than now, in 2023.

I won't repeat most of that discussion here, except to say that I took a bottom-up view, going through the most contentious seats race by race. In what follows, I reproduce here what I said about the contested Georgia seat in particular. I think in light of subsequent developments it stands up pretty well. (I'll delete some now irrelevant bits, though.)

----------------------------------

Georgia -- incumbent Raphael Warnock (D) has the Dem field to himself while the Republicans engage in a fratricidal primary. Warnock is using the time to fill his war chest for the fall. He is also the beneficiary of serious disunity on the Republican side. Trump is supporting Herschel Walker, former star player with the Georgia Bulldogs....

Not coincidentally, Trump owned the New Jersey Generals, a team in the brief-lived USFL years ago, and Walker played on that team. I don’t think Trump’s analysis goes much further than that....

More serious baggage: Walker has described his own games of Russian roulette. He wrote in a memoir of sitting at a kitchen table in 1991 pointing a gun, with a single bullet, at his own head. It sounds like a scene from Deerhunter. It also sounds like a dubious qualification for a deliberative legislative body. 

Other baggage? His relationship with his ex-wife, Cindy Grossman. She received a protective order from a court in 2005, alleging abusive and controlling behavior. 

There are also credible charges that Walker has been lying about his business record. For years he has claimed that his company, Renaissance Man Food Services, employs hundreds of people. But in 2021 the govt was issuing checks for “payroll protection." Why didn’t Walker apply for a subsidy to help him protect those hundreds of jobs? Well, it wasn’t because of any conscientious objection to the program. He DID apply for payroll protection. But he applied for a subsidy for only eight employees! Why eight instead of hundreds? The most likely explanation is that he was originally wildly overstating the size of his business. 

Added to all of this: Walker has run an odd non-campaign. He neither debates his Republican opponents nor allows himself to be interviewed by any reporters he deems even potentially unfriendly. This keeps him from having to answer questions about the above points, or about policies of concern to Georgians for that matter I think it is a reasonably safe projection that if Walker wins the Republican nomination, he will lose the general campaign to Warnock....

----------------------------------

That was as of April. In more recent news, reporting has uncovered at least two instances in which Walker had a child in whose upbringing Walker has played no part. In one of those instances, the child's mother sued Walker in 2014 to establish paternity and her right to child support payments. 

This is damaging because of Walker's past pontifications about the "major major problems" created for African-American communities by the prevalence of fatherless households. communities.

That may be the case, but if so, he isn't helping.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog