Serious moral stakes require serious decisions. In 2022, that means voting for Herschel Walker.
Voters should not lightly support candidates of bad character, but a man who commits even the gravest private sin is still better than one who wants the very same sin promoted by the government and funded by the taxpayers.
R epublicans have a lot of reasons to be excited right now about the 2022 elections, but the quality of Republican candidates is not one of them. There are candidates who pass the test of public character despite some poor judgments, and candidates who fail on issues central to their jobs. For pro-lifers in Georgia, Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker provides a particularly painful test. The Georgia Senate election presents an age-old question in a representative democracy: Does personal, private character matter? I submit that it does — but as with so many questions involving political judgment, the answer requires more than just a bumper sticker.
Walker has now been accused by two as-yet unidentified women of paying for them to have abortions of children he fathered with them out of wedlock. Can pro-life voters pull the lever for a man who would kill his own children? There are really three questions. One, did he do it? Two, what is the role of private character in Senate races? Three, what are the public stakes?
She Said, He Didn’t Say
The big “October surprise” began with a Daily Beast story claiming that Walker paid a woman to have an abortion of a child they conceived together in 2009. There has since been a follow-up and further reporting, and a second woman has come forward, whose name is also not known, although she recently appeared on television. The second woman’s claims, which are much further in the past, have been described by Barnini Chakraborty of the Washington Examiner as being supported by “voice recordings, hotel receipts, and a handwritten poem in which he allegedly declared his love.”
Conservative voters, burned in the past by late-hit, media-boosted allegations of sexual improprieties against Republican political candidates and judicial nominees, are skeptical, and not without reason. We don’t know the names of these women, or really anything that would allow us to evaluate their credibility. They are said to have supporting documentation, but rather than see it, we are asked to rely on the say-so of journalists — and until last week’s Washington Examiner report, these assurances were provided only by outlets deeply hostile to Walker and his likely voters. If this was a criminal trial, I couldn’t convict Walker on this sort of evidence.
But it’s not a criminal trial, it’s a democratic election. Voters are often asked to make decisions about the character of their leaders on the basis of incomplete evidence that hasn’t been subjected to a full adversarial process. As I have argued in past controversies, the lack of a process to get to the truth should color our judgment, but it doesn’t absolve us from making judgments. In doing so, we ordinarily use our own personal experience and common sense, and in an election, we are on fair grounds asking whether a charge is more likely than not to be true.
Here, while the allegations are unproven, they are plausible, they are detailed, they are unrebutted in any way that casts doubt on the accusers, and they have not fallen apart weeks after being aired. The story from the original Daily Beast report states that the unnamed woman — a registered Democrat — received a get-well card and a $700 check from Walker days after the abortion, and that she conceived a second child during her affair with Walker. The Daily Beast claims that she showed a $575 receipt for the abortion. We are told that the second child she conceived with him, who is still living, came later and is “publicly acknowledged” by Walker. While the Daily Beast has not shared her identity with the Walker campaign, one would assume that a candidate for office at least knows who all his children and their mothers are.
Walker denies the core of the story. He says that the check was not meant to be for an abortion, and that he gives hundreds of dollars to lots of people he doesn’t remember. It is plausible that a wealthy public figure would write checks and even get-well cards to people he scarcely knows. But the combination of the dates — assuming the Daily Beast is accurately reporting its documentation and the existence of the second child — is both detailed and suggestive. Bluntly put, this does not look good for Walker.
It looks worse once we consider the second accuser. She may be further in the past, but she is also willing to go on camera and willing to offer her evidence to be seen by journalists who are not from liberal outlets. Walker has little to say besides denial.
Walker has been admirably forthright about his struggles with mental illness, his many past sins, and his reliance upon the redeeming power of Christianity. But this is a double-edged sword: Given his other acknowledged misdeeds, including multiple children fathered out of wedlock, it is not hard to believe that he did this, and not all that hard to believe that he would lie about it today. He has not been above continuing to misrepresent his past in recent years. And it is not helping his credibility that his outspoken 23-year-old son Christian followed the story breaking by accusing him of lying and tweeted, “You left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence.”
If the allegation is false, then Walker is of course right to stand on his denial. Brett Kavanaugh’s experience, albeit in a different setting, reminds us of both the virtue and the wisdom of standing up for one’s good name no matter how serious the charge. But if the story is even partly true, it would be the right thing both morally and politically for Walker to own up to his past and beg the voters for mercy as a repentant sinner. The pro-life movement has always welcomed converts — from notorious abortionist Bernard Nathanson to former Planned Parenthood clinic worker Abby Johnson to Jane Roe herself, Norma McCorvey — and Evangelical Christian voters have a pronounced soft spot for redemption stories of amazing grace. But a sinner must first repent.
Some pro-life voters may well conclude that all of this is yet another election-year hoax. But I don’t. Which means that, in assessing whether pro-lifers can vote for this man for the Senate with a clear conscience, I have to go further.
Character and the Senate
That raises the second question: Does character matter? For most of the history of the American republic, nobody would have said otherwise. Yet Americans did not always reject candidates for public offices with notorious character flaws. In 1884, for example, everybody knew that Grover Cleveland had an illegitimate child, and he won the presidency anyway. Ted Kennedy was regularly returned to the Senate after killing a woman and getting away with it; his state’s Democratic House delegation included Gerry Studds — who’d been censured by the House for a sexual relationship with an underage House page — and Barney Frank, who hired a live-in male prostitute who literally ran an escort service from Frank’s home. Marion Barry was returned to office after being caught on camera smoking crack with a prostitute.
In the 1990s, however, Democrats went a step further and advanced the “compartmentalization” theory: that Bill Clinton’s predatory sexual behavior was so separate from his public role (even when he preyed on subordinate employees and Democratic donors) that it was entirely irrelevant — indeed, that he should be exempted from consequence for committing crimes in office using the power of his position, so long as the object of the crimes was to cover up private sexual sins.
The doctrine of compartmentalization was abandoned by Democrats in 2016 when they got a look at Donald Trump, although they couldn’t quite admit that they’d renounced the idea so long as Clinton’s wife was their presidential nominee, seeking to put both of them back in the White House. It suffered further blows in the “Me Too” era, and in the pursuit of Trump in office.
So, character matters. Public character matters more, but private character tells us what restraints a man respects. There are three other crucial qualifiers that I have long applied in evaluating a politician’s private character and how it relates to his public character.
The first is that we need to look at the character of the whole man, with his virtues and vices together, not just any one incident — although obviously, the graver the vice, the harder to offset it with virtue. As I explained back in 2008, in evaluating the character of John McCain and that year’s other national candidates:
Character is not a series of yes/no questions. It is the test of the whole man, and the test of a lifetime. We understand that all our leaders have sins. Some are more serious than others (surely, marital infidelity is one of those), and some are more recent and current than others, but we are well-advised to judge the whole man, the whole record. A 24-year-old DUI conviction did so much damage to George W. Bush in the week before the 2000 election because, relatively speaking, he did not have a long, countervailing record of positive proof of his character when he ran for president. The same is true of rookie candidates like Obama and [John] Edwards and Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin — having less by which to judge them, each incident and each failing grows larger in proportion. And a character flaw becomes more serious when it reinforces negative impressions about a candidate’s public career. For conservatives, at least, Bill Clinton’s serial infidelity and pervasive dishonesty about the matter was troublesome because it was so completely consistent with the public Clinton.
Walker is a man of some known virtues — his work ethic, overcoming of youthful adversity — but he’s also a rookie candidate, with no experience in public office. He is also a man of several known and serious sins, including admittedly fathering children out of wedlock whom he is not raising. And while the accusations are a decade or more old, Walker is 60 years old, so these are not just youthful indiscretions we’re discussing.
The fact that Walker is likely lying to the public is bad, as that relates directly to his public character, but by itself, it is not decisive; if we expelled all the known liars from the Senate, it could never meet a quorum.
Then again, there’s a mitigating factor here that is uncomfortable for pro-lifers to talk about. I believe that abortion is tantamount to murder: It is the taking of an innocent human life without justification. Herschel Walker, today, professes to believe this as well, perhaps sincerely. I do not know how long he has believed this, or whether he had a different view a decade or two in the past. But here’s the thing: For half a century, Americans have lived in a country in which the law taught that abortion was moral and defensible. This is precisely why, aside from pure political calculation, pro-lifers blanch at prosecuting women who abort their children: because we understand that these women have been misled by the culture they grew up in to think this sort of action was acceptable. That means that many people who have or perform abortions, or induce or support others to do so, have convinced themselves that they are not actually taking a human life. It will take time for us to change those cultural assumptions. Of course, it gets harder to do that with leaders who share them.
Second, as I also noted as far back as that 2008 essay, “Character does matter, and matters more for executives than for legislators due to the nature of the job and the broad discretion executives enjoy.” Both executives and judges have a significant scope of discretionary power, so we should exercise particular care in choosing them. The vast powers of the presidency were a major reason why I was unable to support Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020: “Character and competence matter in public office, and they matter more in offices that have a lot of power and a lot of discretion. That is never truer than in the presidency.” I would not vote for Walker for an executive office, just as I would have great difficulty voting for, say, Doug Mastriano.
By contrast, the central job of legislators is to vote the right way, and vote for their side to control the chamber. It is a comment on the sad condition of the United States Senate that this is a much larger portion of the jobs of our senators today than it once was, although even now, senators make many decisions implicating their character beyond just votes. And the Trump era awakened us to some of the dangers of even reliably conservative Republicans when they lack the character to oppose corrupt leaders of their own party. So, I am willing to overlook more sins of character in a legislator, but that does not make the issue irrelevant.
That brings us to the third issue: One of the biggest reasons we care about character in a legislator is that we fear that bad men will not keep their promises. This puts us, as pro-lifers, in precisely the opposite situation from that of Walker’s pro-abortion critics. They believe that Walker did something that they think is just fine. To them, the problem is instead that paying for, and encouraging, abortions shows that Walker’s public stance is hypocritical.
Hypocrisy is bad, but it is always the lesser of two evils. As I explained back in 2007:
I much prefer to see Republicans who will stand up against abortion . . . regardless of the state of their private lives, than those who feel that they have to take a squishily pro-choice position because they fear the scrutiny of the anti-moral scolds. It takes a truly twisted perspective to see a man who commits private sins while arguing in public for virtue, and choose to take issue with the latter. So, two cheers for the hypocrites. Even if they don’t do right by themselves or their families — even if, at times, they deserve to be punished by the law or defeated at the polls — they should still be proud to have done the right thing in their time in public service.
In this respect, Trump’s influence is actually a positive one: His example has shown that even wicked men, if they know that their elections depend upon the votes of pro-life social conservatives, will have more to fear from betraying those voters than they do in being called out for hypocrisy.
The Stakes
There are those who take a hard line on matters of character. My friend David French, for example, has regularly argued that if a candidate for public office has not demonstrated the character and fitness to serve, he does not deserve your vote, period. This is a defensible principle, and I came out where David did on voting for Trump, but it is one I cannot accept as a general rule. Not only do we live in a fallen world in which our leaders are often far lesser men and women than we would like, we also live in a binary, two-party political system in which the opposing party accepts no such constraints upon itself. The stakes of an election matter, and the higher the stakes, the more we should be willing to make compromises in order to stand for good against evil — to stand for the American way against its enemies and protect the weak from the merciless.
I have voted for quite a number of awful or compromised people for public office, when the alternatives were worse. I have, I confess, sometimes lived to regret that. In 2009, I voted for Kevin Halloran for the New York City Council. Republicans were badly outnumbered on the City Council at the time and needed somebody to make our voices heard. Halloran was literally the blood-drinking head of a pagan sect. As it turned out, Halloran ended up getting indicted by the feds for selling access to the Republican mayoral primary to a Democrat.
In a better world, pro-life voters and those concerned about the character and integrity of their representatives could be indifferent to the consequences of rejecting Walker. But matters are not so simple. The Senate is evenly divided, and the Georgia race may well decide partisan control of the chamber — with massive ramifications not only for the legal status of abortion but many other areas as well. While I would blanch to embrace the view that United States senators need meet no standards at all besides casting the right votes, the paramount importance of voting and partisan control of a chamber that controls the courts counsels for being more lenient in the standards of character and fitness we apply to senators. Moreover, the fact that this is a six-year term, while it gives me more pause about Walker’s character, means that just throwing the seat away will have costs far beyond those of the Alabama special Senate election in 2017, in which I would have been unable to pull the lever for Judge Roy Moore. Moore lost that seat, but Republicans recaptured it in two years.
In 2022, the abortion issue is directly on the ballot as never before. Joe Biden is pledging that, if he were to keep Congress and get to 52 senators, the first thing he would do is pass a federal law abolishing all state restrictions on abortion. Moreover, the mere fact that Democrats have doubled down on making this entire election a referendum on abortion means that victory or defeat in every race will contribute to how our political class interprets the election results on abortion policy for years to come.
Walker’s opponent, incumbent reverend Raphael Warnock, is hardly an admirable figure himself, as I have previously detailed, albeit in ways that do not trouble his supporters:
In Warnock’s [case], the man of the cloth faces allegations by his ex-wife that he ran over her foot in a heated domestic dispute and is failing to pay child support in a divorce and custody dispute so messy that Warnock has convinced the judge to bar the media from covering it. Added to that are new charges that Warnock is threatening to evict low-income tenants over paltry sums of rent arrears.
Worse, the very thing Walker is accused of doing privately with his own money — paying to finance the abortion of an innocent child — Warnock supports doing publicly with taxpayer money. Warnock would do this nationwide, forever. He has advocated for legal abortion, proposed a new federal entitlement program that would be unconstrained by the Hyde amendment’s restrictions on public funding for abortions, and voted for repealing the Hyde amendment — a longstanding federal pro-life policy that saves tens of thousands of lives every year. Compounding the sin is scandal: Warnock uses his public platform to preach a perverted form of Christianity in which the slaughter of innocents is blessed by God. David French has reminded Democrats of the awful choice they have presented to pro-lifers by supporting this man:
Someone needs to tell the Democratic Party what’s at stake. Because right now, it’s making an unsustainable demand of Republican voters: You sacrifice the policies that you believe are best for our nation and its people; we sacrifice nothing.
There’s no better example of this approach than Raphael Warnock’s stance on abortion rights. He was one of 49 Democratic senators who voted for the Women’s Health Protection Act. This bill doesn’t just “codify Roe.” It would preempt hundreds of state laws that existed before the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs, including, for example, waiting periods, 20-week abortion bans, and ultrasound requirements.
It would permit pre-viability abortion for any reason. It would allow for even post-viability abortion to protect the life or health of the mother, where health isn’t limited to physical health. That leaves the health exception broad enough to include permitting late-term abortion if just one health-care provider concurs with the mother that her emotional or psychological health is at stake.
If that law were to pass, America would immediately become an outlier nation on abortion rights, more permissive than the overwhelming majority of its peer countries in the developed world. And Warnock voted to stop a Republican filibuster against this bill even though Georgia—one of the nation’s more religious states—is so anti-abortion that it enacted a heartbeat bill before the Supreme Court decided Dobbs.
No one who sees any moral problem with Walker paying for an abortion could possibly vote in good conscience for Raphael Warnock, nor sit by and regard with indifference the prospect of Warnock being reelected. It sends a bad message to elect to the Senate a man who kills his own children; it sends an even worse one to reelect a man of the cloth who preaches that doing so is a virtue in the eyes of the Lord.
As is so often the case, I turn to my political heroes, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Both worked with more than a few allies of bad character, from Daniel Sickles (a known murderer, among other things) to Strom Thurmond, in order to attain great ends. Ask yourself: Would Lincoln support a slave-owner over a non-slave-owner, if the election turned on slavery and the non-slave-owner was clearly the more pro-slavery candidate?
This was not a hypothetical; it actually happened in 1848:
In 1848, the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor for president. . . .Taylor was a political novice of vague political principles, and because he was a large-scale Louisiana slaveholder who would not campaign against slavery, Charles Sumner and other “Conscience Whigs” refused to support Taylor. The Conscience Whigs were, in 2016 terms, Never Taylor. Lincoln didn’t join them. He and William Seward, later his secretary of state, both remained faithful Whigs and stumped for Taylor against Lewis Cass, a northerner running on a “popular sovereignty” platform more favorable to the expansion of slavery. As it turned out, Taylor in office was much more hostile to the pro-slavery Democrats than anticipated . . . and grew to detest his former son-in-law Jefferson Davis.
Lincoln left no doubt of his choice: He headed Taylor’s campaign in Illinois, placed his name on the ballot as a Taylor elector, and even toured Massachusetts to convince anti-slavery Whigs not to defect to the third-party Free Soil ticket headed by Martin Van Buren.
If Abraham Lincoln could campaign for a slave-owner to fight slavery, pro-lifers can pull the lever for a man who paid for two abortions to fight abortion. It’s not a vote any of us would be proud of. But serious moral stakes require serious decisions. In 2022, that means voting for Herschel Walker.