“Saying the quiet part out loud,” is one of the more overused clichés these days but sometimes even banality can perfectly capture the moment.
Take Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer, who today was inadvertently heard over a live microphone fretting over the fact that Herschel Walker’s campaign for U.S. Senate just won’t die, like a vampire come to suck control of Congress’ upper chamber directly from Schumer’s carotid artery.
Walker, a Republican, would help Republicans recapture the Senate and hand control back to current Minority Leader Mitch McConnell by beating Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock. On a normal planet that we once called Earth, that’d be a long shot at best: Walker’s a political novice who’s been caught in enough lies and controversies during his campaign that somewhere, John Edwards laments he didn’t wait another 20 years before running for president.
But in the world we currently live in, the idea of Walker as the next U.S. Senator representing Georgia is a real possibility, so much so that Schumer is nervous enough to lament it to President Joe Biden on a tarmac in upstate New York.
“The state where we’re going downhill is Georgia. It’s hard to believe that they will go for Herschel Walker,” Schumer told Biden, with neither man apparently aware that nearby mics were capturing the exchange.
Schumer wasn’t wrong on either account: Walker is still polling well with just over a week remaining in the Georgia contest, which is one of the most watched in the country. And it is hard to believe that the majority of voters in a state that just two years ago handed control of Congress over to Democrats by voting for the lineal successor to the pulpit of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., will hand it back to Republicans by voting for Herschel Walker, even if that state happens to be Georgia.