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.)
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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....
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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.
He was a good football player. Why sully a good reputation with a bad decision, later in life?
ReplyDeleteYes, he was. Sugar Bowl, 1982, classic match-up between the Bulldogs and the Pittsburgh Panthers, may have been one of the best college football/bowl games ever played. The Bulldogs lost in a near-run thing against Pittsburgh Panthers. The Panthers were quarterbacked by Dan Marino -- who had a big future ahead of him in the pros. But Walker was probably the stand-out player of the game even in a losing cause.
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