Why Joe Biden has been 'conspicuously silent' about the Herschel Walker abortion scandal: reporter

12 October 2022

Countless Democrats have been slamming former football star Herschel Walker, who is running against incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in Georgia’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, in response to a bombshell Daily Beast report that in 2009, he impregnated a woman and paid for her abortion. MAGA Republican Walker has been campaigning on a severe anti-choice platform, calling for abortion to be totally illegal even in cases of rape or incest. Yet according to a woman interviewed by the Daily Beast, Walker was more than happy to pay for her abortion when he wasn’t ready to have a child.

Walker has vehemently denied the Beast’s report, threatening to sue the publication. But the Beast has stuck by its reporting, maintaining that it has solid proof of the woman’s allegations.

Walker, critics say, has become the latest Republican poster child for far-right social conservatives who point the finger at others but don’t practice what they preach — a long list that, over the years, has ranged from fire-and-brimstone evangelical televangelist Jimmy Swaggart to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was having one of his extramarital affairs while he was condemning President Bill Clinton for cheating on then-First Lady Hillary Clinton with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

But one prominent Democrat who has been “conspicuously silent” about the Walker scandal, according to Daily Beast reporter Scott Bixby, is President Joe Biden. Bixby offers some reasons for this silence in an article published on October 12.

“Unlike nearly every other high-profile member of his party, Biden, who has majorly stepped up his pitch to the Democratic base in recent weeks, has made no reference to Walker at party fundraisers, in engagements with reporters, or at public events,” Bixby reports. “According to Biden allies, long-time advisers and party strategists, the decision not to nationalize Walker’s past actions is likely part political calculus — to avoid injecting himself into a local race — and part personal preference — to avoid turning a painful family crisis into campaign fodder.”

A source quoted anonymously and described by Bixby as a “long-time Biden ally” told the Beast, “That is part of Joe Biden’s character: that he is someone who genuinely believes there are things that are out of bounds, particularly exploiting the personal pain of a family. You don’t need to exploit children and personal pain to win.”

The Beast also interviewed Democratic strategist Karen Finney, who commented, “Politics is a tough business, but at the end of the day, there’s obviously a deep understanding that we’re talking about people who have families and lives and make mistakes. I think there’s an appreciation that in personal family business, there ought to be some things that actually are off-limits.”

According to Bixby, another reason Biden has stayed out of the Walker controversy is fact that Warnock is facing “a tight midterm race in a state where” the president’s “approval sits at just 37 percent.”

Democratic strategist Lis Smith believes that Warnock needs to keep his campaign Georgia-centric rather than turning it into a referendum on national politics — which, according to Smith, makes a case for Biden to stay out of the controversy.

Smith told the Beast, “It’s not Joe Biden’s job to define Herschel Walker, and it wouldn’t be particularly helpful to Sen. Warnock for the president to try to. It’s absolutely delusional that anyone thinks nationalizing the Walker scandal will somehow tip the Nevada or Arizona Senate race toward Democrats.”

Never Trump conservative Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist, argued that calling out GOP hypocrisy on abortion is perfectly legitimate — although Biden doesn’t have to be the one to do it.

Miller told the Beast, “I don’t think this White House is particularly adept at carrying purely political messages, so I don’t really know that it matters whether they engage on this or not…. Arguing that these guys want to ban abortion without exceptions for vulnerable women while paying for abortions themselves is compelling.”

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