Image for article titled IDIOT OF THE YEAR No. 1: Herschel Walker

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2022 is the calendar year Herschel Walker rebranded himself as a generational Fool OF THE Calendar year expertise. There experienced been glimpses just before, but he showcased his complete-assortment of idiocy in 2022. Every single week, the previous UGA and NFL working back again humiliated himself in pursuit of electric power and affect he appeared to have no strategies to generate it for, past the sheer ambition of it all. He regularly doubled down on his unlucky President Camacho imitation below the powerful microscope of functioning for one of Georgia’s Senate seats, watched his very own son switch against him, then shed (two times, technically, if you consist of the runoff) and returned to a personalized lifestyle remaining in shambles.

Recruited to operate for Raphael Warnock’s Georgia senate seat as the token black applicant in Donald Trump’s obsequious rogues’ gallery of unelectable election-denying candidates, Walker was amongst the worst of the worst. If you lumped jointly a scouting report of the major Trump-backed losers to operate for office in the course of the modern election cycle, none boast Walker’s collective lousiness.

He’d terrorized his ex-wife, alienated the only son he acknowledged the existence of — denigrating his looks and intelligence — referred to as his then-wife’s genes dreadful, probably ran afoul of a number of tax rules for the duration of his marketing campaign, and was regarded as a shameless and obvious recurring liar to his possess campaign staffers. Having said that, what is regarding is that those people attributes may perhaps have been what whisked him by means of a GOP primary so effortlessly he did not even present up at debates as extensive as he brown-nosed Trump. And that is just the preamble to his agonizingly duff general election efficiency artwork.

He represented himself to be a born-all over again Christian, but hid various little ones born out of wedlock a long time aside from his personal marketing campaign and has reportedly been an absentee father to his children. These revelations emerged not extended immediately after he railed against fatherless black children. In his fervor to skewer African-People in america to attraction for assist from a conservative white voting bloc that bristles at any assessment of its possess many years of bigotry, he denied the existence of systemic racism. That element was instrumental to the Walker campaign.

Over a summer time in which a conservative Supreme Courtroom repealed the precedent established by Roe v. Wade, Herschel Walker had the gall to suggest insane total abortion bans. Walker did this though presumably understanding that the females whose abortions he’d paid out for would hear this. Inevitably, which is particularly what happened as two girls came forward with receipts in the variety of checks to blast his blatant hypocrisy.

As a campaigner, Walker was a dud. His oratorical expertise had been akin to a fifth grader detailing Cloud Atlas. He compared his résumé to Barack Obama’s with no a hint of sarcasm and his plan know-how was in fictional fairy tale creatures. During the run-off, Walker fixated on attacking the transgender group and ultimately was offered chaperones all through media appearances to retain him from sticking his foot into his own mouth.

Issues bought so dire for the Walker campaign that the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Georgia publicly expressed his lack of ability to to vote for “one of the worst candidates” in GOP background. Walker acquired his area in infamy and burrowed back again beneath the rock he climbed out of, but not prior to embarrassing the state of Ga in the course of 2022.