Herschel's Run to Nowhere

The Heisman Trophy Winner's sad political campaign needs to end.

To this day, I maintain that Herschel Walker is the greatest college football player I have ever seen.

He possessed a spectacular combination of speed, power, and athleticism that helped him become one of the most dominant running backs in NCAA history. He should have won the Heisman Trophy in his Freshman year at Georgia.

His college career included a National Championship in 1980, and a Heisman Trophy in 1982.

He had a successful pro football career with the USFL and NFL.

He fought in professional Mixed Martial Arts and won both of his fights.

He has succeeded in life more times than most.

But his Georgia US Senate Campaign is one of the most embarrassing, saddest chapters in recent political memory.

Having met Donald Trump who owned the New Jersey Generals of the upstart USFL, Walker was apparently mesmerized by the hotelier, an unfortunate situation that has been repeated with unfortunate consequences many times in the past few years.

He was still mesmerized almost forty years later when the erstwhile president asked him to run for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Raphael Warnock.

The reasons that Walker made a good opponent for Warnock speak to the calculating, mercenary nature of politics:

·       He is Black, Republican and has great name recognition

That’s the extent of his political qualifications.

Never mind that he had to establish residency in Georgia because he’s been living in Texas.

Forget about the fact that he had published an autobiography detailing his violent first marriage, which was exacerbated by him being diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality or split personality disorder).

He was seen as the best possible candidate to unseat Georgia’s first Black senator.

In hindsight, the rush to anoint Walker as the presumptive GOP senate candidate should have been slowed with better background vetting.

If they had dug just a foot or two, they may have uncovered that he had three children who until now had not been publicly acknowledged, and that he has paid for one abortion and tried to pay for another, which is problematic for a “pro-life” conservative.

Moreover, Walker’s lack of communication skills and his bizarre public statements have provided the opposite of positive press. A few of his gaffes:

·       Speaking about being in a mental hospital –

“They told me I had a mental problem…I remember sitting here in this hospital and going, ‘Whoa, these people here are crazy, and I’m not like them.”

·       His thoughts on the Green New Deal

“So what we do is we’re going to put, from the ‘Green New Deal,’ millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. So all of a sudden China and India ain’t putting nothing in there – cleaning that situation up. So all with that bad air, it’s still there. But since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China, bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. And now we’ve got to clean that back up.” 

·       On women’s issues

“I think there’s no doubt: Crime is very, very important. This economy is tough because they’ve got to buy groceries.”

·       On gun violence –

"Cain killed Abel and that's a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation -- what about getting a department that can look at young men that's looking at women that's looking at their social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that and we can stop that that way. But yet they want to just continue to talk about taking away your constitutional rights. And I think there's more things we need to look into. This has been happening for years and the way we stop it is putting money into the mental health field, by putting money into other departments rather than departments that want to take away your rights."

Finally, Walker has been caught in several lies, ranging from saying that he was his high school’s valedictorian and he graduated from Georgia, and stating that he was an FBI agent, among others.

Herschel Walker’s senate campaign is an unmitigated dumpster fire. There’s not much worse that can happen to it.

The best thing he can do is withdraw from the race.

It would be embarrassing and demoralizing to him, but it wouldn’t be any worse than what is happening to him now.

Herschel Walker could outrun most defenses, but he can’t outrun his inadequacies for public office.

But if he makes the right decision, he can retain a measure of self-respect, and that’s worth a lot more than anything else he will accomplish at the present.