Herschel Walker: The Embodiment of Today's GOP

By just about any standard, Herschel Walker is a train wreck, morally, intellectually, and in terms of truth and veracity.  In the Republican Party of my youth, Walker would never be able to secure the Party nomination for even the most menial elected position yet her Walker is running for the U.S. Senate. Walker is an embarrassment to anyone with moral character - something the GOP once argued mattered in its candidates - not to mention a shred of intelligence and interest in policy and solutions to difficult issues.  Frighteningly, in today's Republican Party where the truth and morality no longer matter, no conspiracy theory is too insane, and holding power is all that matters, Walker is the embodiment of the Republican Party.   Trump may have been a cancer that infected the GOP, but most of those who should have known better have willingly embraced the disease and have fanned its spread.  A column in The Atlantic by a former Republican echo's my thoughts and the reality that the best interests of the country are served by defeating Republican candidates at every level possible.  To save the GOP, it must be destroyed.  Here are column highlights:

There have been plenty of awful candidates in American political history; what sets Herschel Walker apart is that he’s a wreck in so many different ways.

Walker, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia trying to unseat Democrat Raphael Warnock, is a compulsive liar, so much so that he falsely claimed he has not made false claims about graduating from the University of Georgia. Walker’s speech is often unintelligible. His argument for why efforts to address climate change are pointless goes this way: “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up, while they’re messing ours up.”

Walker is an absentee father who has been critical of absentee fathers. His campaign has acknowledged that he has three children by women to whom he was not married, in addition to his son Christian by his former wife, Cindy Grossman, who has alleged that Walker threatened to kill her.

Walker hasn’t denied the allegations; instead, he implied it was the result of his struggle with mental illness. (Grossman filed for divorce in 2001, citing “physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior” and secured a protective order against Walker four years later.)

The most recent revelation to roil his campaign is that Walker, who has said he supports abortion bans with no exceptions, allegedly paid for an abortion in 2009 and urged the woman to terminate a second pregnancy in 2011, which she refused to do.

As expected, Republicans rallied to Walker. “Full speed ahead in Georgia,” declared the president of the Senate Leadership Fund, the body’s leading Republican super PAC. “Republicans stand with him,” said the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Rick Scott. So does National Right to Life.

Ralph Reed, the founder and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, frames Walker’s story as that of a man of past imperfections who has turned his life around. “Herschel’s story is one of redemption and hope,” according to Reed. He told The New York Times he believes that the new reports could increase Republican turnout by rallying social conservatives to defend Walker. Reed may be right.

The Walker-Warnock race is crucial because it might decide control of the Senate next year. But the most important and instructive thing about the Walker candidacy is what it tells us about the Republican Party, starting with how thoroughly Trumpified it is.

Walker, a former Heisman Trophy winner, had no business running for political office at any level, let alone the United States Senate. The only reason he won the nomination is that he was Donald Trump’s hand-picked candidate.

Like so many who now represent the GOP, Walker displays not just a lack of interest in serious ideas but contempt for them. Benightedness is chic.

The Republican Party didn’t write a platform for its convention in 2020. And why should it have? A party platform, after all, is a formal statement of the principles and policy goals to which a party is committed. When a party becomes a cult of personality, interested in power but not ideas, platforms become extraneous.

For those of us of a certain generation, who came of age in the Reagan era, this philistinism is jarring. Conservatism has a proud intellectual tradition, and for many years its (imperfect) home was the Republican Party.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democratic senator and brilliant scholar, wrote in 1981, “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.” The GOP certainly has had its share of fringe figures and obscurantists. But James Q. Wilson, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, Antonin Scalia, Richard John Neuhaus, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Allan Bloom, and Thomas Sowell were people of intellectual rigor. . . . But today’s Republican Party, more populist than conservative, has become an intellectual wasteland.

Yet it hardly ends there. Republicans once sold themselves as representing family values and tradition, concerned with moral standards and civic character. They insisted on the importance of good character and integrity in political leaders. This has been exposed as utterly cynical, most obviously in the support that Republicans—many of whom savaged Bill Clinton over his moral failings—gave to Trump, whose corruptions are peerless and borderless.

Consider just the case of white evangelical Protestants. In October 2016—not long after the notorious Access Hollywood tape was released—more than seven in 10 said an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life. Five years earlier, only 30 percent of white evangelical Protestants had said the same. No other group shifted their position more dramatically.

In 2016, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote, “If I were to support, much less endorse, Donald Trump for president, I would actually have to go back and apologize to former President Bill Clinton.” (Mohler had declared Clinton morally unfit to serve in office.) In 2020, Mohler stated that he would vote for Trump.

Bill Clinton is still waiting for his apology.

Translation: Abortion may be murder, but we stand foursquare with those who encourage and pay for abortions if they provide us the path to power. This is, in itself, a dramatic and depressing shift. Not long ago, those on the right reacted to each new Trump scandal with feeble explanations and justifications for his behavior. Now, as Trump’s imitators and acolytes produce scandals of their own, their defenders don’t even bother to generate excuses.

The GOP has turned on virtually every noble principle it once claimed to stand for. It has become a freak show, embodied in people like Trump and Walker, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, Ron Johnson and Josh Hawley, Blake Masters and Doug Mastriano, Adam Laxalt and J. D. Vance, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Mike Lindell, Tucker Carlson and Sebastian Gorka, Eric Metaxas and Paula White. They shape its sensibilities, providing the script for everyone else to follow.

To make matters worse, those who surely know better—people like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, and especially Kevin McCarthy—turned out to be hollow men, . . .

Whatever you thought about the GOP pre-Trump—and it may be that the ugliness was much closer to the surface than I wanted to acknowledge at the time—the Republican Party is today much more conspiracy minded, anti-democratic, and anti-truth. This worries me, because I love my country. And it disheartens me, because I once admired my party. Today, however, because of its diseased state, the most urgent political task is to defeat it in the hopes of eventually rebuilding it.

Amen!