Should I Feel Bad for Hershel Walker?

Like, it was kind of sad.

A few years ago, I was standing in the low-ceilinged subway station beneath the Capitol where members of the Senate were moving in-and-out, going from votes to their offices or going from their offices to votes. I stood outside the real action, watching the gaggles as reporters crowded the senators and they all moved as a mass toward the elevators. There’s a weird energy to those gaggles. They move and behave almost like bait balls. I could do 10,000 words on the physiology of a Capitol Hill gaggle.

Anyway, I used to just stand down there and watch. And on this day, I was leaning on the railing talking to somebody when a pair of senators went by and all the reporters chased after them, forming one of those swarming bait balls and emptying the subway station. Or, it was almost empty. I looked away from the gaggles and I saw an old lady petting a golden retriever, slowly running her hand over its head. The reporters were still gone and the old lady looked up and I saw that she was Dianne Feinstein, the octogenarian California senator. But her face was blank and as her eyes scanned the subway station, I realized that Dianne Feinstein had no idea where she was.

Of course, within moments, a staffer was at her elbow and guided her onto one of the senate subway cars. The beautiful golden retriever and its caretaker stayed in the station and the gaggle broke up and the reporters returned.¹ A few years later, the New Yorker ran this short expose on how Dianne Feinstein has her good days and her bad days. I don’t know, whatever. I wasn’t going to write it. But I remember watching Dianne Feinstein pet that golden retriever and look up and I remember her vacant gaze and it made me so damn sad. Like, this poor woman — what are they doing to her?²

And sure, you probably don’t feel bad for Dianne Feinstein-the-politician. I apparently didn’t even feel bad enough to try to help her.³ But why should you feel bad for her? She’s enjoyed a wildly successful career. Do you know she wrote the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban? She rebuilt the cable cars in San Francisco. When there are so many people in the world worth your pity, why would you squander it on a lifelong politician who has enjoyed overwhelming success? But this vignette isn’t about Dianne Feinstein-the-politician. It’s about how I saw and realized what was happening at that subway station, and the pity I felt for the senator on a human level. There’s nothing special about that pity — it doesn’t mark me as unique. Most people, if you put them in that situation, would probably experience the exact same pity.

I hadn’t thought about the Feinstein-and-dog anecdote (or the pity that accompanies it) for a while — it was such a strange form of pity that I’d largely forgotten the way it manifested and behaved. But then I began to see that video of Hershel Walker on Fox News and, as stupid as it sounds, that pity returned. And then, for moments at a time; I actually felt sorry for Hershel Walker.

If you’re not familiar with the clip, I’m talking about this Walker appearance on Hannity; the one where he says “this erection is about the people.” You don’t have to watch the video, there’s nothing noteworthy in it other than the Freudian slip and uncomfortable optics: a distracted Walker wedged between Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas who rattle off talking points as a blank-faced Walker (also of Texas but, in this case, of Georgia) glances off-camera, obviously wishing he were elsewhere. I’d never seen anything quite like it. Hershel Walker is such a poor candidate that he needed handlers to appear on Sean Hannity’s show — a program which exists as an organ of the Trump wing of the GOP.

I guess what I’m saying is that in that moment, in the moment I first saw that video, I understood that the Republican Party used Hershel Walker and I felt sorry for him. Did you know that Senate Republicans sent out fundraising emails in Walker’s name and they kept 99 percent of the profits? You can read about it — it was in the news. Maybe that’s why Lindsey Graham occasionally wept when he went on television stumping for Hershel Walker. Maybe Lindsey felt bad about this whole ploy too.

But again, to my direct question, should I feel bad for Hershel Walker? The easy answer to this (the one they will shout as they drag me on Twitter) is a simple no — No, I shouldn’t feel bad for Hershel Walker. It’s not the fault of Senate Republicans (or the media) that Hershel Walker’s children say he’s a shit father and he got headlines for it. But still, when I saw him on that television screen between Cruz and Graham, I pitied him. I literally pitied-the-fool.⁴

Now don’t go around telling people that I lose sleep over Hershel Walker. Because I don’t. But there’s a certain pity that hit me when I saw him in certain situations — when he’s at a podium with his name on it and instead of a stump speech, he rambles on like a talkative child, delivering a ten-minute commentary on a movie he just watched with vampires and werewolves. It’s the same sort of pity that hit me when I saw Dianne Feinstein’s blank face: a pity evoked at the realization that this person is so deeply out of their element that they are incapable of functioning in the scenario into which they have been thrust.

Throughout the Walker-Warnock campaign (which I did not write about and followed only tangentially on Twitter), most of us couldn't help but feel like Hershel Walker didn’t want to be a senator. It was pretty obvious that Donald Trump talked him into running and the Senate Republicans went along with it because Donald Trump was backing him. But what did Hershel Walker actually want? He never had any policy positions. His biggest platform was anti-abortion and he turned out to secretly be very pro-abortion.

And so as the results came in as we all expected, I was relieved. I won’t have to feel any more of that pity for Hershel Walker. He’s out of the news cycle. Lucky for him. And honestly, lucky for the rest of us too.

1. These dogs were down there in the senate subway station all the time, they were therapy dogs and I don’t know where they came from. But they were always very sweet and very pretty.

2. There’s a nuance here — Dianne Feinstein is the reason that Dianne Feinstein is still a senator. What that New Yorker piece made clear was that Democrats in the Senate have been trying for years to get Feinstein to step away from her seat. She refuses. Hershel Walker is different in that he is being used by the GOP.

3. I think about this too sometimes. Why didn’t I help her? Should I have? I was honestly so stunned at what I saw that I couldn’t process it in time to react. Like what do you do when you encounter a senile senator? They don’t teach you that scenario at Columbia (ed. note: I did not go to Columbia).

4. Because, come on, Hershel Walker is a fool. If he were to go to Washington, he would only ever appear as the butt of his own joke. Everybody on Capitol Hill — Republicans, Democrats, reporters, janitors, Uber drivers, the people who work at the Longworth Dunkin — would laugh at him. On climate change, he said China’s “bad air” would move over to our air space. He said inflation affects women more than men because women “gotta buy groceries.” Like, he actually pulled out a fake badge at a debate.