By Noel Holston

In gridiron in terms, what I am about to say would be called piling on. Many political writers nationwide have already weighed in on onetime football star Herschel Walker’s U.S. Senate candidacy and his staggering lack of qualification.

But I live in Athens, Georgia, home of the University of Georgia, where Walker won a Heisman Trophy in 1982 and became a celebrity, a Peach State icon, so here I go, jumping in. Throw a flag if you want.

If elected, Hush-uhl, as the good ol’ white alumni say, would be biggest dunce in the Senate. Maybe ever.  

His candidacy represents a new low for GOP cynicism and disregard for the larger public good. Everybody knows he’s as ignorant as a tackling dummy, but while Democrats and old-line Republicans find that alarming, the MAGA wing of the Grand Old Party doesn’t care as long as Herschel can win and flip the Senate red.

And he just might. 

In November 2020, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, primary minister at Atlanta’s Ebeneezer Baptist Church, once the home Dr. Martin Luther King, made history when he won a special election for the Senate seat opened by Republican Johnny Isakson’s early retirement for health reasons. Warnock narrowly beat a white, Republican woman, Kelly Loeffler, in a fierce, costly race to become Georgia’s first African-American Senator. 

But the prize he won was only the remaining two years of Issakson’s six-year term. Warnock is now running as an incumbent for his first full term.

The GOP turned to its dirty trick playbook. The bosses know that Warnock, only 53, is not just one of the most charismatic Democrat to emerge since Barack Obama; they know he’s already making a mark in the Senate and that his national recognition is growing. So they didn’t bother with another white candidate. They embraced Walker, a pigskin superhero in a football-crazy state, a Donald Trump-defending (and endorsed) black celebrity who is acceptable to white conservatives and could very well peel off enough black votes to trim Warnock’s winning margin. 

Walker is such a big deal in Georgia that his campaign signs don’t even show his last name. Like Prince and Adele, he’s mononymous: Herschel.

On the downside for Republicans, Walker has been accused of domestic abuse by an ex-wife and has documented history of exaggeration and fabrication with regard to his life and accomplishments. Here’s a man so oblivious to his own prevarication that he has claimed to be valedictorian at UGA when, in fact, he did not graduate. He left school early for the pros.

Walker has said things, not just unawares on hot mics but in public forums, that make his backer Trump’s incoherent word salads sound like a TED talk. 

After the horrible school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, for instance, Walker told an interviewer on Fox who asked about his views on gun control, “Well, you know, it’s always been an issue…People see that it’s a person wielding that weapon, you know, Cain killed Abel. And that’s the problem that we have. And I said, what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You talk 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?”

At a campaign stop, Walker said, “Warnock, I remember hearing him say, ‘America need to apologize for it whiteness.’ That’s not in a Bible I ever read. Our Founding Fathers already apologized for its whiteness. Because if you read the Constitution, it talks about every man being treated fair.”

I will wait while you, dear reader, scratch your head and try to figure out what the heck any of that gibberish means. And it typical of what Walker say.

This is why his campaign ads show him smiling his mega-watt smile, running with a football, mingling with adoring fans and reading simple sentences from a TelePrompter. It’s also why Walker’s handlers have so far avoided even scheduling a debate with Warnock, much less putting him on a stage with the vastly quicker minister. They know that in a clash of wits, intelligence and knowledge, Warnock is the Heisman-quality talent and Walker is a water ___.

You can fill in the blank. I won’t say the word because I am white and might be accused of making a racist remark even though I am just making another football analogy.

This, however, does underscore a serious potential flaw in the GOP’s strategy, the other side of a double edge. Warnock can say things to and about Walker that a white Democrat could not. 

So far, though, Warnock has mostly stayed above the fray. TV ads in which he’s featured on camera focus on who he is and things he’s already accomplished, such fighting for help for American soldiers ill from burn-pit exposure. 

Warnock ads that don’t feature him hit Walker hard. One spot, culled from a 2008 CNN interview, shows Walker’s ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, tearfully claiming Walker put a pistol to her temple and threatened to blow her brains out and, another time, threatened to cut her throat.

Walker hasn’t quite denied these allegations. He’s has, however, attributed past misbehavior to his suffering from dissociative identity disorder, or DID — what we used to call multiple personality disorder.

Comforting, no? I mean, we’re used to politicians being two-faced, but Herschel may be taking us into Three Faces of Eve territory. He could be a Sybil servant.

I am hoping and praying Georgians of the right-ish persuasion have a come-to-reason moment and either stay home on election day or vote for the preacher from the Savannah projects.

As for Herschel, well, I agree with what the Auburn cheerleaders used to chant:

Push him back, push him back, waaaayy back.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He serves as Georgia Correspondent for Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (2000-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.