What Herschel Walker's clueless campaign says about the GOP

[marmar]

Opinion What Herschel Walker’s clueless campaign says about the GOP

By Paul Waldman
Columnist
August 23, 2022 at 1:47 p.m. EDT

(WaPo) In the race for U.S. Senate in Georgia, Republican nominee Herschel Walker is forcing people to ask: Just how clueless is too clueless to serve in Congress? And what would it mean if our national legislature was filled with people like Walker?

The former football star’s campaign has been a series of howlers and head-scratchers, the latest of which is his argument against the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act: “They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out. But they’re not ... Because a lot of money it’s going to trees ... Don’t we have enough trees around here?”

The possibility that Georgians are fed up with all their trees notwithstanding, no one says that Walker is the first office-seeker to lack even the most rudimentary understanding of policy or the issues he would confront. And there is in fact some money in the IRA to promote trees, including urban “heat islands” where a lack of shade trees increases temperatures.

....(snip)....

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently predicted his party might not win control of the chamber, saying “candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome” of these races. No one doubted that Walker was one of the candidates he had in mind.

Yet Walker is hardly the only one; since so much rides on former president Donald Trump’s endorsement in GOP primaries and the most important qualification for winning that endorsement is an embrace of his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, from coast to coast we’ve seen the party’s nominations won by crackpots and halfwits, perhaps more than ever before. ..............(more)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/herschel-walker-dimwitted-campaign-senate/

[vlyons]

1. I've posted this before, but it can't be said enough

Shame shame SHAME double triple shame on those GOPers, who encouraged Walker to run. He has an IQ of maybe 65-70 at best, and that was before any football head trauma.

This is how low the GOP will stoop.

[edhopper]

2. And yet

He still stands a good chance of winning.

[Frasier Balzov]

5. The AA voter will be asked to make a choice.

The pastor or the football player.

Whatever Walker's inherent "quality" as a candidate is, that contrast between the two is probably at least somewhat strategically competitive.

[Jade Fox]

3. "crackpots and halfwits"

That sums it up perfectly!

[Glorfindel]

4. Tom Wolfe, "A Man in Full":

"He looked away from the buildings and out over the ocean of trees. Since Atlanta was not a port city and was, in fact, far inland, the trees stretched on in every direction. They were Atlanta's greatest natural resource, those trees were. People loved to live beneath them."


The topography and geography of Atlanta

Poor ol' Herschel just doesn't get it. From the coastal marshes to the Okefenokee Swamp to the wilderness areas of the north Georgia mountains, we Georgians love our trees.