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Brian Ballard, a prominent Republican lobbyist in Washington, D.C., recently agreed to hold an event for Senate hopeful Herschel Walker and came away with a positive impression of the candidate.
Ballard told The Washington Post that those in attendance “came away hugely impressed with his grasp on policy.”
That is very difficult to believe.
A few months ago, for example, Walker tried to share some thoughts on energy policy. It was an embarrassing disaster: As my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones put it, Walker “delivered a meandering response that was detached from reality and syntax.” A month later, the former football player reflected on mass shootings in schools, and the resulting word salad was a mess. When Walker tried to talk about voting rights, his comments were even less coherent.
It’s against this backdrop that the Republican candidate tried to talk about climate change at a recent campaign event:
“Y’know, climate change — I’m gonna help y’all with that real quickly, and I’m gonna do it in the Wrightsville way, so you can understand what I’m saying. We in America have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world. So what we do is, we’re gonna 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 into cleaning that situation up. So all that bad air is still there. But since we don’t control the air, our good air decide 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. And now we got to clean that back up.”
It’s tempting to compare Walker’s comments to a student trying to do a book report about a book he obviously hasn’t read, but that’s not quite right: The way the Senate hopeful spoke, he seemed quite sincere, as if he were genuinely offering a meaningful tutorial about an important issue.
He was not. Walker’s comments were effectively gibberish — or more the point, this was the latest in a series of examples of the Georgia Republican addressing public policy with comments that were effectively gibberish.
Stepping back, the question isn’t whether Walker is prepared to serve in the Senate; the question is what Republicans intend to do about the fact that Walker obviously is not prepared to serve in the Senate.
And the answer, by all appearances, is to simply keep up the charade and hope that Georgians elect him anyway.
The Daily Beast reported last week that members of the GOP candidate’s own team “don’t trust Walker” and harbor concerns “that he isn’t mentally fit for the job.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution added yesterday that campaign aides are focusing on keeping Walker away from journalists.
“Herschel Walker, the wannabe U.S. senator, is avoiding contact — with opponents, with the media, with good sense — like the way Georgia Bulldog fans sidestep wedding invites that fall on a gameday,” Adam Van Brimmer, opinion editor of the Savannah Morning News, wrote in a recent column. “Walker isn’t so much running for U.S. Senate as he is running from it.”
And yet, The New York Times reported, “[T]hese developments have mattered little to Republican officials and strategists, several of whom said in interviews that their support for Mr. Walker has not wavered.”
This is disheartening, but not especially surprising. In a post-policy Republican Party, it doesn’t matter that Walker has no idea what he’s talking about. It similarly doesn’t matter to the GOP that Walker lies with such frequency, even to his own aides, that those around him have questioned his mental stability.
Rather, what matters to the party is whether Walker can win, not whether he should win. And with the former athlete slightly favored to get elected, despite his strained relationship with reality, Republicans facing awkward questions about Walker’s competence have a simple answer: They don’t care.
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson made the case in his latest column that if Walker wins, it will be proof that “this nation has truly lost its mind.” It might very well happen anyway.