I am so fucking happy to see him again:
Former President Barack Obama described Herschel Walker as “a celebrity that wants to be a politician” during a speech Friday night in Georgia, lauding the Republican Senate nominee as “one of the best running backs of all time,” but someone who is not equipped to be a United States senator.
Obama went point-for-point against Walker, calling him “someone who carries around a phony badge and says he is in law enforcement like a kid playing cops and robbers,” attacking his “issues of character” and his “habit of not telling the truth,” and describing him as someone who is going to be so loyal to former President Donald Trump “it means he is not going to be really thinking about you or your needs.”
The speech, the former Democratic president’s first full foray onto the campaign trail in 2022, framed the midterms as a choice election “between politicians who seem willing to do anything to get power and leaders who share our values, who see you and care about you.”
“Just about every Republican politician seems obsessed with two things – owning the libs and getting Donald Trump’s approval,” Obama said. “That’s their agenda, it is not long, it is not complicated and, at least to me, it is not very inspiring. They aren’t interested in actually solving problems. They are interested in making you angry and finding someone to blame. Because that way you may not notice that they have got not answers of their own.”
Obama was greeted with booming applause inside the Gateway Center Arena in College Park, Georgia. At several points, he delivered one of his old campaign classics: “Don’t boo, vote!”
He acknowledged the economic headwinds facing Democrats in November, saying: “Listen, inflation is a real problem right now. It’s not just in America, it’s world-wide. It’s one of the legacies of the pandemic.”
But he suggested Republicans have not offered policies or plans of their own, saying: “Republicans talk a lot about it, but what is their answer? What are their economic policies?”
There’s more:
Obama imagined people seeing Walker in the airport or hospital, and allowing him because of his success on the football pitch to fly the airplane or do surgery.
“You wouldn’t say that,” said Obama.
Obama said “the opposite is true too” in that people may have liked him as a president but they wouldn’t want his “slow, old, skinny behind” on the football field.
“You’d have to scrape me off the field,” he cracked, before flipping his “Yes we can” slogan to: “No, I can’t. No, I can’t.”
Senator Warnock was a lot more blunt with his ding on Walker:
You actually have to know stuff to do this job,” Warnock said.
He said Walker is “not ready” and “not fit” to represent Georgia because the office requires that the holder be someone that people can trust. He said Walker “lies about the most basic facts of his life.”
Walker has faced intense scrutiny throughout the campaign over a lack of transparency following multiple revelations about his personal life.
He has run his campaign emphasizing family values, but reports revealed that he has fathered a total of four children with different women, three of whom he was not married to. His son Christian Walker has slammed him recently for being largely absent from the lives of all his children.
Walker has also run on a platform staunchly opposed to abortion, without any exceptions. But he reportedly reimbursed a woman who eventually became the mother of one of his children for an abortion she had after they conceived a child in 2009.
The woman also claims Walker encouraged her to get an abortion the second time she became pregnant, but she went through with the pregnancy. A second woman accused Walker on Wednesday of pressuring her to have an abortion in 1993 during a multiyear affair.
“He wears his lies quite literally as a badge of honor,” Warnock said, referring to a badge Walker pulled out during a debate between the two candidates.
Walker has claimed that he trained as an FBI agent and has worked with the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in June that he has never been a certified FBI agent or officer and no record exists in Cobb County to support his claims.
And Warnock’s campaign has been making sure to remind voters about this:
Driving the news: Warnock's deputy campaign manager Rachel Petri said in a statement Wednesday that the report "is just the latest example of a troubling pattern we have seen play out again and again and again. Herschel Walker shouldn’t be representing Georgians in the U.S. Senate."
- After the first abortion allegation, Warnock's campaign remained silent.
- In a Monday campaign appearance, Warnock told reporters he's talking about his opponent's past because "an election is a choice. And the people of Georgia deserve to see that choice."
- "I think if you want to know what somebody will do once they're in office, just take a look at their life before they ran," he said.
- Warnock, who ran a largely positive campaign in 2020, dodged questions about Walker's past for most of 2022. But his campaign recently launched ads about the first abortion allegation, on top of September attack ads featuring Walker's domestic violence allegations.