Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and former President Obama knocked GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker’s fitness for office at a rally Friday.
Obama traveled to Georgia as one of several stops he is making ahead of the midterms with less than two weeks until Election Day. Warnock and Walker are locked in a tight race for the Senate seat in the state, but the incumbent senator and former president said at the rally that Walker has not put in the work necessary to serve in the role.
“You actually have to know stuff to do this job,” Warnock said.
He said Walker is “not ready” and “not fit” to represent Georgia because the office requires that the holder be someone that people can trust. He said Walker “lies about the most basic facts of his life.”
Walker has faced intense scrutiny throughout the campaign over a lack of transparency following multiple revelations about his personal life.
He has run his campaign emphasizing family values, but reports revealed that he has fathered a total of four children with different women, three of whom he was not married to. His son Christian Walker has slammed him recently for being largely absent from the lives of all his children.
Walker has also run on a platform staunchly opposed to abortion, without any exceptions. But he reportedly reimbursed a woman who eventually became the mother of one of his children for an abortion she had after they conceived a child in 2009.
The woman also claims Walker encouraged her to get an abortion the second time she became pregnant, but she went through with the pregnancy. A second woman accused Walker on Wednesday of pressuring her to have an abortion in 1993 during a multiyear affair.
“He wears his lies quite literally as a badge of honor,” Warnock said, referring to a badge Walker pulled out during a debate between the two candidates.
Walker has claimed that he trained as an FBI agent and has worked with the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in June that he has never been a certified FBI agent or officer and no record exists in Cobb County to support his claims.
Walker admitted in an interview with NBC News that the badge he flashed during the debate was an “honorary badge,” but Warnock has slammed him for “pretending to be a police officer.”
“If we can’t trust him to tell the truth about his life, how can we trust him to protect our lives and our families and our children and our jobs and our future?” Warnock said.
Obama said the race between Warnock and Walker is a “study in contrast.” He said Walker was an “amazing” football player, but that does not make him the best person to represent Georgia in the Senate.
Obama compared the idea of electing Walker to the Senate to having Walker fly an airplane if someone sees him at an airport.
“You’d probably want to know, ‘Does he know how to fly an airplane?’” he said.
He said being a football player is not disqualifying for running for Senate, but players need to “put in the work.” He said there is little evidence that Walker has taken “any interest” in learning anything about public service or helping people.
“At least we don’t really know about it, and that does make you suspect,” Obama said. “Seems to me, he’s a celebrity who wants to be a politician, and we’ve seen how that goes.”
He said issues of character and having a habit of not telling the truth say something “about the kind of leader you’re going to be.”
“If a candidate’s main qualification is that he’s going to be loyal to Donald Trump, it means that he’s not really going to be thinking about you and your needs, and you deserve better,” Obama said.