DID HERSCHEL WALKER WIN THE GEORGIA SENATE DEBATE?

Black Headline News
The Black Wall Street Times
By Nehemiah Frank, Founder & Editor-In-Chief 

Did Herschel Walker win the Georgia Senate Debate gainst Sen. Raphael Warnock? It depends who you ask as to whether or not Republican candidate Herschel Walker won the debate on Friday night in Savannah. But if you ask yours truly, a Georgian Black man who lives in Dekalb County, I would tell you he didn’t win – but he didn’t lose either.

In a highly anticipated debate against Democratic Senate incumbent Rev. Raphael Warnock, Herschel Walker, a former football star, did his job, which was to simply survive a live debate against Warnock. And that, he did – barely.

From the top of the debate, Walker tripped and stumbled over his words, as he usually does.

“I believe in reducing insulin, but at the same time, you gotta eat right. I know many people [sic] that’s on insulin. And unless you [sic] have a eating right, insulin is doing you no good. So you have to get food prices down, and you gotta get gas down, so you can go get insulin,” Walker declared.

But why can’t you get insulin prices down, too, like food prices and gas prices should be, Mr. Walker? 

Taking on the role of a wanna-be physician, like a wanna-be police officer, Herschel Walker seemingly accused roughly 8.4 million Americans who use insulin of not “eating right” – thus contributing to them having diabetes. It was both an irrational, illogical statement. It was hot dirty air, embedded with Walker stigmatizing some 30 million Americans who have diabetes.

During the debate, Walker also blames them for not being able to afford insulin because of inflation, not placing the blame on multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies who are perversely overcharging their customers as if they aren’t overwhelmingly wealthy enough.

It was a pathetic and embarrassing failed answer to how to make insulin more affordable during times of high inflation from his competition – Warnock.

It was offensive, not to mention his abuses in verb-subject agreement.  

Previous to Walker’s bumbles and blabbers, Warnock shared his solution that he helped pass in the US Senate, the Inflation Reduction Act, which had two of his provisions. 

“One caps the cost of prescription drugs for seniors. So they don’t need to choose between buying medicine and groceries. One caps the cost of insulin,” Sen. Warnock said during the Georgia Senate Debate.

Walker doubled down that he paid for a woman he shares a child with to get an abortion, despite her having a receipt, a bank statement, and his signature on a check he made out to his kid’s mother. 

“That’s a lie. And on abortion, I’m a Christian. And I tell people this, Georgia is a state that respects life, and I’ll be a Senator that protects life,” Walker said. 

Nevertheless, Georgia is still one of a handful of states that sponsor state-sanction murder through its death penalty while providing law enforcement officers damn near complete immunity in killing unarmed Black people during encounters. 

Moreover, Walker previously said he supports a total abortion ban, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or if a mother’s life is endangered. But during his debate against Raphael Warnock, Walker said that he supports Georgia’s Heat Beat Bill, which gives exceptions for rape and incest if a police report is filed before a fetus reaches 20 weeks. 

Walker claimed to be transparent, but even his son, Christian Walker — a GOP rising superstar or political puppet, but an unapologetically Queer person, has called out his father’s inauthenticity and lies. 

Walker is all but a truth-teller and shows signs of being a flip-flopper politician.

On funding for more student loan forgiveness, Walker needs to remember that everyone doesn’t receive a full-ride athletic scholarship to a university as he did. Thus, his position is that he is opposed to abolishing student loans for millions of American college students, many of whom are suffering from financial hardship due to their loan obligations.

“I didn’t cosign for anyone’s loan,” he stated. 

For example, Harvard University attracted over $800 million in research funding last year, of which 70 percent was funded by the federal government. For HBCUs, the American Rescue Plan is investing $2.7 Billion. 

An undergraduate degree will cost an average of 169% more than in 1980. 

Walker’s solution? “I would get rid of federal funding for any college that raises their cost.” 

As if the University staff and research labs don’t affect everything from medical breakthroughs to technological advancements on how to prevent our world’s ever-growing climate crisis, Walker could only deliver a single sentence on such a complex issue. It was another underdeveloped, mediocre response lacking depth for such a serious situation.

Throughout the debate, cheers and applause from the audience were heard seemingly approving Herschel Walker responses. I could only wonder if they were paid spectators, planted for the television audience as a distraction to mask Walker’s incompetent answers. Because of them, Walker merely survived the his Georgia Senate Debate, the hardest debate of his life.

 As we cringed listening to Walker onstage, it soon became clear there could not be any two more different candidates. Walker, a man who has no clearly identifiable allegiance to the GOP has been propped up by people who only look to dismantle the progress of Black voters in Georgia. Him being cheered on by that small group of debate watchers is emblematic of the life he’s lived, one in which he’s been allowed to skate through because of his ability to score touchdowns and enrich himself without regard for anyone else in his life whom he’s reportedly regarded as disposable.

What was apparent during the debate and throughout Walker’s campaign is that he lacks the seriousness to study and fully understand and discuss the issues. And what was evident, like his political icon Donald Trump, Walker doesn’t like to read. Hence, we can’t trust that he will study the issues and develop a sensible plan to resolve them.