The eyes of the nation are on the State of Georgia as we undergo this competition for the US Senate seat this coming November. For the first time in the history of the USA we witness two black men competing for a Senate seat at the national level, and for the first time also the incumbent happens to be a black man, the first black man ever elected to the US Senate from the State of Georgia.
This contest is peculiar also in the contrasts of the life preparation of the candidates. On the one hand we have an incumbent, Dr. Warnock, largely unknown statewide and nationally before his election to the present Senate but coming with an extremely well prepared academic and pastoral background. On the other hand we have a contender, of limited academic or professional preparation, but bearing a universally recognizable name and athletic deity in the State of Georgia, and wearing a mantle placed on him by the Republican revered former President of the USA, Mr. Donald Trump.
While neither of the two contending gentlemen is being nasty to the other, the dance that they are engaged in is classically instructive to those who may want to run for political office. The incumbent Dr. Warnock has cleverly concealed his outstanding scholarship and has refrained from taking advantage of the honor that a Senior Pastor of the revered Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the Seat of Martin Luther King Jr. carries. Warnock’s style is to let Mr. Walker’s inadequacies reveal themselves. Warnock is being very careful not to allow sympathies that naturally fall on him, to be transferred to his opponent through a process of piling on or running up the score. Warnock for the most part is sticking to the Issues.
The real politics of the situation is that in spite of his obvious weaknesses as a candidate, and his incomparability to Dr. Warnock by normal standards, Herschel Walker could win this Georgia race for the U.S. Senate. Party supporters tend to wear blinkers, and history will occasionally throw up leaders that the populace will follow lemming-like off a cliff. Reasoning and analysis are fast disappearing qualities in the current electorate. Folks seem on the one hand to be misidentifying their self-interests, and on the other hand to be misinterpreting the philosophical underpinnings of the Parties vying for power. We are not cutting off our nose to spoil our face, we are reshaping our face to fit our nose.
Irvine Weekes