Warnock Decries Walker as ‘Not a Serious Person’

Rev. Raphael Warnock campaigns in Fowler Park, Cumming, Ga., on Nov. 19, 2022. Courtesy of Phil Mistry/PHIL FOTO.

CUMMING, Ga.—Raphael Warnock on Saturday asked voters in Cumming, Georgia, to come out for him one more time during his Dec. 6 Senate runoff, and his fifth Senate-related election in two years.

Cumming is in the fast-growing Forsyth County, considered a Georgia swing district where Georgia Democrats have focused lately to pick up exurban votes. Part of a tech corridor extending north from Atlanta, Forsyth has attracted migrants from other states during the pandemic and boasts an increasingly diverse population. This was in evidence on Saturday with signs like “Latinos for Warnock” and “Asian Americans for Warnock.”

There aren’t many African Americans in Forsyth, and Warnock, who was nearly an hour late—an hour in which candidates from the recent election, winners and losers alike, vamped to fill the time—joked about it.

Raphael Warnock campaigns for the Dec. 6 Georgia Senate runoff in Cumming, Ga., on Nov. 19, 2022. Courtesy of Justin Kase

“You need someone who’s serious about working with everybody on both sides of the aisle. Really, I’m serious about working with everybody. I came to Cumming,” Warnock said as the crowd laughed. “Thank you. I read the charts. I know where I am. Glad to be here. Where’s the BBQ?”

A person who’s not serious, he said, is his Republican opponent Herschel Walker.

“You need a serious person. Here’s the danger. I happen to be running against somebody who is not a serious person,” he said.

Raphael Warnock campaigns for the Georgia Senate runoff in Fowler Park in Cumming, Ga., on Nov. 19, 2022. Courtesy of Justin Kase Photo

“You actually have to know stuff to do this job,” Warnock said, a catchphrase he returned to several times.

It’s one that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also turned back against Warnock while campaigning with Walker on Thursday night in Gainesville.

“Warnock said today, ‘To go to the Senate, you actually have to know stuff,’” Graham said. “Let’s test that out. You know what I know and Herschel knows? Women shouldn’t be competing against men. You know what I know and Herschel knows? Why should you be forced to buy oil from people who hate your guts when you got a bunch of it here at home?”

“You know what I know and Herschel knows? If you just discharged 5,000 brave men and women from the military who are willing to get shot because they won’t take a shot, that’s stupid. And if you let 4 million illegal immigrants come across the border without taking a shot and give them a free weekend in Vegas, that’s offensive.”

Warnock on Saturday challenged various controversial claims Walker has made about himself, such as being a police officer. Walker, during his debate with Warnock in Savannah on Oct. 14, flashed a badge in a move ridiculed in some circles. 

Walker showed later, though, there was some truth to it. He admitted to NBC News the badge was honorary, but said it was also “legit” and gave him certain powers in the county where he grew up. The Johnson County sheriff confirmed to NBC News that he’d issued the budge to Walker, and that Walker could assist police there in a crisis situation. 

Warnock on Saturday stuck with the party line. “He said he’s a police officer. He’s not.” 

Walker may imagine that this and other claims he’s made are true, Warnock told the crowd of over 300 people, “and now he wants the rest of us to imagine he is a United States senator. He is not!”

Warnock talked about his humble upbringing, as the 11th of 12 children growing up in a housing project in Savannah, and the first in the family to go to college. He voiced his support for abortion, expanding access to voting, and addressing climate change. He touted his successful court battle this week to restore a day of early voting for the Saturday after Thanksgiving after the state had taken it out.

He also talked about having been arrested several times for protesting and not regretting it. Getting arrested protesting, he said, is part of the job description for the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King once preached.

And, although he’s voted with the Biden administration 96 percent of the time, he talked up his bipartisan efforts. He got some laughs when he mentioned the Warnock-Cruz Amendment to the infrastructure bill that he passed with conservative Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), which had to do with an extension of Interstate 14—currently just a short stretch in Texas—all the way from there to Georgia and maybe into South Carolina.

Warnock recalled the day that the Senate affirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first African-American woman Supreme Court Justice. Vice President Kamala Harris suggested to him and fellow Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) that they write letters to someone to capture the moment. Warnock said he wrote one describing the scene to his then five-year-old daughter Chloe and read it to her that night in a video call. She was unimpressed, he said, and the crowd laughed. When he was done, Chloe asked if she could go play now. He said she’ll understand better as she grows up.

“And it occurred to me in the months after I wrote that letter that that’s what legislation is; that’s what public policy is. In the end, it’s a letter to our children, and we might actually get it right if we ask ourselves what we want our letter to say. Whether you’re talking about health care legislation, or talking about investing in domestic manufacturing and microchips, whether you’re talking about climate change; in the end, the work we do is a letter to our children.”

Charles and Linda Purcell of Roswell and their dog Boone at a rally for Raphael Warnock in Fowler Park, Cumming, Ga., on Nov. 19, 2022. Dan M. Berger/The Epoch Times

Linda and Charles Purcell of nearby Roswell brought their black Lab Boone with them on the cold but sunny day in Fowler Park. They said it was their second runoff rally of the day, having attended one for a school board candidate earlier in Roswell. They came to this one, they said, because it was so crucial for the state and the country, even if Democrats already have at least 51 votes in the Senate, including Harris’s tie-breaker vote in the 100-seat chamber.

Linda Purcell, a retired schoolteacher, said she supported Warnock because he supports abortion and for his work bringing down the cost of insulin. One of the Purcells’ four grown children is diabetic.

“In a race this close, he needs all the support he can get,” Charles Purcell, a food chemist, said. “It’s crazy close. And Herschel Walker is supported by (Donald) Trump. We don’t need that.”

A mother with her daughter in the crowd gave her name only as Mandy. “I’m a lawyer. That’s why I can’t give my last name. My clients. I’m in taxes.” Her daughter, Avery, 11, said she wanted to come because she doesn’t like hatred, and “it’s best to accept people for who they are.” 

And her mother said Avery two months ago at a Stacey Abrams rally had seen a table outside displaying allegedly banned books, including “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which Avery found disturbing. Marshall University’s website listing banned or challenged books includes the famous book, the diary of an adolescent Jewish girl in hiding during the Holocaust. It notes that isolated challenges to the book—in schools in Northville, Michigan; Grants Pass, Oregon; and Culpeper County, Virginia—focused on a few explicitly sexual passages. 

A publisher advised Anne’s father Otto Frank, the only member of the family to survive the war, to cut those when it was first published in Dutch in 1947. They were restored in some version almost 50 years later. Most of the challenges to the book, which centered on objections to middle-school children reading the graphic passages aloud, were eventually overridden. Culpeper County opted to restore the book to the curriculum, but to raise the grade level at which students read it.