When Georgia Republican Herschel Walker began his campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Walker campaign's main task was to play down Walker's history of domestic violence and death threats, his involvement with a company that scammed American veterans, his promotion of a scammy-sounding anti-coronavirus spray, his public lies about his college and business career, his suspiciously opaque supposed financial disclosures, and an ongoing array of public statements that suggest Walker doesn't know anything about anything.
They've mainly tried to roll with this with a campaign that relies almost exclusively on "hey, you remember this guy from football" coupled with whatever portrayals of Walker as family man can be mustered from a man who once held a gun to the head of his now ex-wife. But if Walker lacks as "family man" material, that may no longer be a problem for his campaign. He can emphasize quantity, not quality. Sure he might not be the best family man, but he's got two of them! Wait, I mean three of them! Hang on—four! He's got four separate families! How many guys up on the campaign stage can brag about that?
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Yeah, we should have seen this coming. Very fresh on the heels of a Walker admission that he is the father of a second son who, according to him, he wasn't trying to keep "secret" but just didn't feel like mentioning, reporters have now uncovered at least two additional children Walker never mentioned. In addition to the 22-year-old Christian, who Walker has been actively involved with, and a newly revealed 10-year-old son who Walker has had little contact with, The Daily Beast reports that documents show Walker also fathered a now-13-year-old son in Texas and, in college, a now-adult daughter.
So Walker is now known to have at least three out-of-wedlock children who he has such little contact with that even his own campaign did not know they existed. One of Walker's few coherent political stances has been to rail against "fatherless" homes for Black American children, but it appears that 75% of Herschel Walker's own children have grown up fatherless.
That might count as hypocrisy if we could be confident that it was the whole story. If there's one thing Walker's candidacy has proven, however, it's that nothing the Republican candidate has ever said could be trusted to be the whole story.
And for all Walker's indignation, in a new statement claiming that his children are "not 'undisclosed'" and "I've never denied my children," The Daily Beast notes that the Walker campaign's Tuesday statement on the revelation of the second of his children "referred multiple times to the candidate having just one child out of wedlock."
So Walker approved a statement acknowledging just two of the four children, but now says he "never denied" them, huh. Well, that'll make for some fun conversations around Thanksgiving, at least for whichever children he's willing to visit with then.
All right, so Herschel Walker is a liar and a hypocrite, a possible scammer, a political buffoon with a history of domestic abuse and a string of children he has so little involvement with that even his own campaign didn't know they existed. Fine. I think we could have all left it with "if you put a gun to your wife's head, you probably should forever be excluded from the United States Senate" but we're dealing with Republicans who don't blink at plots by a sitting Republican president to get his own vice president assassinated, they're not going to blink at any of this.
Walker is also benefiting a bit from the worry that he is perhaps himself a victim of a too-eager Republican machine. Many of his campaign trail statements are so incoherent as to raise questions about his state of mind.
It's not entirely clear, when Walker shoots the breeze like this, what's going on, but this does not seem like Senate-caliber oratory, no matter how many children it turns out Walker does or doesn't have. But it might just be a very, very dedicated Donald Trump impression?
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