The Political Gospel of Raphael Warnock - Raphael Warnock HEAD TOPICS

The Political Gospel of Raphael Warnock

10/23/2022 7:34:00 AM

With his opponent Herschel Walker weathering a series of scandals can the Democratic senator from Georgia find a way to retain his seat

2022 Midterm Elections Raphael Warnock

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The New Yorker

Politicians are said to govern in prose and campaign in poetry, but in Senator Raphael Warnock ’s case it has been something like the reverse. With his opponent Herschel Walker weathering a series of scandals can the Democratic senator from Georgia find a way to retain his seat It was nearing dusk, and the sky was lit in pink and orange. Warnock was standing on the steps of Dorchester Academy. During segregation, the school was for Black students only and had also served as a training center for civil-rights activists, where “they taught you what to do when they set the dogs on you,” as a rally attendee, a retired soldier named Gil, described it to me. One of the speakers who introduced Warnock, the state representative Al Williams, had marched at Selma. There was an audible shuffling of chairs; the audience members were still taking their seats. Warnock had mentioned the oak tree largely to fill time. Read more:
The New Yorker » In Georgia Senate race, Warnock needs his 2020 coalition. But inflation, fatigue could keep them home The Herschel Walker Scandals: A Guide To The Abortion And Domestic Violence Allegations That Have Roiled The Campaign Politicians seek to leverage celebrities to reach voters Raphael nos hizo pasar una ‘gran noche’ a puertas de cumplir los 80

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If you have always suspected you might just be a mosquito magnet, scientists now have evidence for you: Mosquitoes indeed are attracted to certain humans more than others, according to a new study. Read more >> In Georgia Senate race, Warnock needs his 2020 coalition. But inflation, fatigue could keep them home Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock needs minority and suburban voters to turn out in his race against Republican Herschel Walker in the midterms. Warnock is rat bait. The Herschel Walker Scandals: A Guide To The Abortion And Domestic Violence Allegations That Have Roiled The CampaignWalker trails Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock by four points with less than a month left until the midterm elections, according to an Emerson College poll released last week. Patiently waiting for the guide to the Warnock scandals. Still slave owners on all your money regardless of the douchey left or right. 🥱 WIth all his lunacy - he is still neck and neck with his challenger... CRAZY! Politicians seek to leverage celebrities to reach votersA beer garden near downtown Atlanta filled for a recent event hosted by Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock aimed at Latino voters. “Who I’m really here to see is Lin-Manuel Miranda, because I’m a really big fan of his,” said Camilla Estrada, of Atlanta, who described herself as liberal and said she plans to vote for Warnock. Celebrity endorsements in politics are nothing new, and it's unclear how much influence they have, said Mark Harvey, a management professor at the University of St. Mary in Leavenworth, Kansas. Raphael nos hizo pasar una ‘gran noche’ a puertas de cumplir los 80En el YouTube Theater, el ídolo español Raphael transitó nuevos terrenos sin abandonar su ya clásico estilo English please, we’re in America !! Austin at Large: The Most Serious Time of the YearWhat do we really want these people to do for the people who might elect them? Save Story Save this story for later.August poll of Latino voters in Georgia by UnidosUS found 70% of Latinos believe abortion should remain legal, yet it still ranked below the economy, inflation and gun violence among their top issues.Share to Linkedin Topline Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker remains close in the polls with Sen.American pastor and politician (born 1969) Lin-Manuel Miranda American actor, rapper, composer, and filmmaker Herschel Walker American football player and political candidate (born 1962) Stacey Abrams American politician, lawyer, voting rights activist, and author ATLANTA (AP) — A beer garden near downtown Atlanta filled for a recent event hosted by Democratic U. Most of politics isn’t oratory. The number of politicians who have an ornate twenty-five-minute speech prepared about the arc of the American experience vastly exceeds the number who will ever deliver one. "The economy has always been a primary concern for Latinos every single election cycle. Even so, when an orator presents himself, it tends to attract attention.. Recently, at a campaign rally in rural Midway, Georgia, Raphael Warnock took note of a magnificent oak tree “with Spanish moss,” he said, “bending and beckoning the lover of history and horticulture to this magic place."The thing that is different, that is important, is that abortion access and sensible gun control are issues that are front and center.” It was nearing dusk, and the sky was lit in pink and orange. 8 against Republican challenger Herschel Walker. Warnock was standing on the steps of Dorchester Academy. In Georgia, 43% of voters in the Quinnipiac poll said inflation is their top concern, compared with 14% who said abortion. Getty Images Timeline September 2, 2021 A friend of Walker’s ex-wife claims he threatened and stalked her in Texas in 2002, according to a police report seen by , throwing a wrench in the Senate candidate’s narrative of being a “family man” (Walker’s campaign declined to comment on the report). During segregation, the school was for Black students only and had also served as a training center for civil-rights activists, where “they taught you what to do when they set the dogs on you,” as a rally attendee, a retired soldier named Gil, described it to me. One of the speakers who introduced Warnock, the state representative Al Williams, had marched at Selma. Matching the Republican playbook in other battleground states, Walker's team has slammed Warnock and Biden over immigration, crimeand inflation, Republican senators who have stood behind Walker amid his controversies have framed a vote for Walker as a way to stop Biden's agenda. There was an audible shuffling of chairs; the audience members were still taking their seats. October 3, 2022. Warnock had mentioned the oak tree largely to fill time. Rick Scott, R-Fla. And some of the biggest fans at Miranda’s appearance Wednesday night, like 7-year-old Sophie Hinsbi, clutching a book from the animated Disney musical “Encanto,” were too young to vote. “I’m a pastor,” Warnock went on, once everyone had settled in. Since 2005, he has occupied the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King, Jr. Many Georgia Republicans are sticking behind Walker despite his controversies. , was baptized and where he preached until his death, in 1968. “I’m used to walking with people when they are in their lows and in their highs.9 percentage points, found that 90% of Republicans would vote for Walker if the election were today. I’m used to standing there with parents as they bless their babies. Almost 575,000 people had voted in Georgia by the end of Thursday, roughly on pace with the 2020 presidential election when 5 million votes were cast in the state, buoying Democratic hopes that a big turnout might help them. I’m used to standing there marrying couples, and speaking words of comfort when a loved one is sick, or standing there in some damp cemetery having to say farewell. Past as prologue? Or just past? “I don't believe none of it,” said Rosa Lamb, 70, said at the first rally Walker after the abortion news broke  in Wadley, Georgia.” The gospel “compels us to speak on behalf of the marginalized members of the human family,” Warnock continued. “It is that work that got me here in the first place." Christina Hyde, 35, of Roswell, Georgia, a self-described independent who leans Republican, said, "What's in the past is in the past. What I’m trying to say to you is I’m not in love with politics. I’m in love with change. Abortion fallout: At Herschel Walker campaign event, Ga. Harvey said his research showed Trump was particularly effective at dominating news coverage in 2016, and noted that he had heard a lot about Walker despite living far from Georgia. ” Warnock is still relatively new to politics, having won his first campaign, in January, 2021, to fill the last two years of a Senate term, and he now holds only a slight lead in a reëlection campaign that he still may lose. But he has shown an ability to strike notes that Democrats have not struck for a very long time. Bullock said those voters have three options: vote for Warnock, vote for Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver, or skip the race altogether. In July, 2021, Warnock delivered a speech in the Senate chamber about voting rights which moved his colleague Senator Cory Booker , of New Jersey, to tears. Warnock had called democracy a “political enactment of a spiritual idea, that we are all children of God, and therefore we all ought to have a voice in the direction of our country and our destiny within it. There's evidence Walker's abortion controversy has lost him at least some support.” What captured Booker’s attention was Warnock’s straightforward invocation of faith, which can sound different than the modes of political speech that have dominated the Democratic Party since the ascent of Barack Obama . Harvey, who wrote a 2017 book about celebrity influence in politics, said there's strong evidence that celebrities can draw media attention to issues. “Obama was this gifted intellectual, like your favorite professor, who could speak to your aspirations, to your hopes for this country,” Booker said. The Quinnipiac Poll found Warnock has support of 7% of Georgia Republicans, but Walker is backed by just 1% of Democrats. “But the difference I think with Warnock is—you feel his soul first. He is unapologetic in his rooting in faith."And for those who can't bring themselves to vote for him, what do they do?" 'Voting is too dumb': Roe is gone, student debt is piling up and young people are mad.” On the campaign trail, Warnock almost never mentions or the MAGA movement. He favors policies that are modest, discreet, with some tangible benefit for ordinary people: the fourteen-hundred-dollar checks of the pandemic , a bill he sponsored to cut the cost of insulin for people on Medicare, the expansion of Medicaid. In Georgia's race for governor, Democrat Stacey Abrams has struggled to match Warnock's poll numbers in her bid to unseat Republican Gov. Still, famous people continue to wade into politics. He often boasts about the unlikely pairings that he has made with Republican co-sponsors. His rhetorical move is to insist that these small-seeming, noncontroversial policies carry a bigger meaning. Warnock is performing better among white voters than Abrams. “There is a road running through our humanity,” he said at one campaign stop, to make a case for an extension of Interstate 14, which connects red and blue parts of the South, and which he worked on with Senator Ted Cruz. A favorite riff begins, “I believe that infrastructure is spiritual. "Brian is protected against the anti-Trump Republicans.” Warnock, a pastor for a working-class congregation, is making a case that Democrats have long wanted to make: that the Christian tradition worth upholding in politics—to find Jesus in “the dark corners, in the alleys, in the gutter,” as Booker put it—is the one associated with King. “They never back down from a fight,” Lake’s campaign wrote in an email to supporters. But it is a complicated bargain to strike, one that blurs the lines of a church, a moral movement, and a power-seeking political party. Georgia governor's race: In Georgia politics,   some analysts subscribe to a"30-30" model as the pathway for Democrats. “The Democratic Party, in an effort to be inclusive, has sanitized their faithfulness, and left that purview to be claimed by the Republican Party,” Booker said. “I’m hoping the Democratic Party can move more towards Warnock. In the 2021 Senate runoff race, Black voters cast 32% of the ballots, with 94% of them backing Warnock,  according to the Associated Press VoteCast survey .” He added, “We need more poets in politics.” Politicians are said to govern in prose and campaign in poetry, but in Warnock’s case it has been something like the reverse. In contrast, although Black voters made up about 30% of the votes cast during Abrams' narrow loss to Kemp in the 2018 governor's race, Abrams won just 24% of the white vote.” In Georgia, Kemp has attacked Abrams as “Celebrity Stacey,” saying last month that Abrams is “running her campaign to cater to liberal elites” and not to Georgians, and mocking Abrams, a Star Trek fan, for her cameo appearance earlier this year as president of Earth in “Star Trek: Discovery. His first political campaign was dominated by former President Trump’s challenges to the legitimacy of the election in Georgia. His second campaign has been drowned out by the chaos of his opponent, Herschel Walker , a retired football star who had been a legend at the University of Georgia, and a favorite of Trump’s. Meanwhile, turnout among Black voters remains a question, even though Walker has shown no signs of peeling away Black voters from Warnock. Walker had been seen as a dicey candidate in the first place, because he had written an autobiography discussing his experience with dissociative-identity disorder (formerly known as multiple-personality disorder), and Walker’s ex-wife had said that he had once held a razor blade to her neck while threatening to kill her. During the campaign, it turned out that Walker had fathered at least three children whom he had previously not acknowledged, and was also prone to bizarre statements, repeatedly insisting that action to stave off climate change was futile, because any “good air” the U."Democrats' chances of winning any statewide office is bleak if Black turnout doesn't meet or exceed expectations.S.4 billion into our economy know where Georgia is?" she said. generated would be replaced by “bad air” which would “move over” from China. Schofield, 78, a retired GM employee, who is Black, said he's backing Warnock over Walker because of Warnock's authenticity. Amid these hurricanes, in a state which until 2020 had not voted for a Democrat for President in a generation, Warnock has often campaigned with the extreme discipline of a man aware that he has a relatively narrow path to an extraordinary amount of influence and power. As Warnock was beginning a tour through southern Georgia earlier this month, the news broke that Walker had allegedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, despite Walker having often expressed an extreme anti-abortion stance."He's a man of his word. After Warnock’s first event, in Savannah, a semicircle of reporters waited expectantly, some scripting questions in note-taking apps—always a slightly ominous sign. Warnock approached cautiously." Schofield also said he's trying to persuade more Black men, including those with whom he attends church, to show up and vote. An NBC correspondent asked whether Herschel Walker could be trusted to tell the truth. Warnock said, “That’s not up to him or me—it’s about the voters of Georgia. But I've talked to a few," he said.” A Yahoo reporter tried, admirably: Walker’s abortion scandal and the allegations of domestic violence against him were pretty stark, but voters had not seemed to break with him—why? Warnock said, “I’ll let the pundits do the punditry.” Warnock is always a controlled presence, but he was speaking especially quietly, especially slowly. 6, 2022, in Wadley, Ga. I had the impression of a home printer, just turned on, which proceeds to check the paper supply, ask for a refill of magenta ink, spin its rollers—anything to cordially postpone the task at hand. Eventually, he allowed that the allegations against Walker were “disturbing,” but even then he veered back to his campaign’s theme, of his own preparedness to do the job: “This election is about who is ready to represent the people of Georgia. Voting rights groups.” It seemed to me that we were watching something slightly unnatural: a candidate suited for an idealistic era in politics trying to pass through the vortex of a cynical one. From within the sweaty scrum, I asked Warnock, “Wasn’t there a moral component to this?” Warnock turned toward me. “My opponent,” he said, “wants a nationwide ban [on abortion]. That would include rape, incest, and the life of the mother. And I think that raises some very”—he paused—“thorny moral questions. And those decisions ought to be left squarely in the hands of women and not politicians.” We were standing in a church parking lot about a block and a half from where Warnock had grown up, in the red-brick projects of the Herbert Kayton Homes, in Savannah. (He had seen a woman he recognized from his youth and called out to her, “From the red brick.”) The Mayor, Van Johnson, a Black man in his early fifties, roughly Warnock’s own age, had given a warmup speech, and later I asked him to sketch a bit of life in the city. “O.K., sure. . . . Obviously, Savannah is a majority African American city, intergenerational poverty, exemplified by these housing projects,” Johnson said, of the Kayton Homes. “But also an indomitable spirit, of people who want to do better and raise their families in spite of their circumstances.” Warnock’s father was both a preacher and “a junkman,” Warnock said from the podium. “He would pick up broken-down cars in his truck” during the week, and, “on the weekend, he lifted up broken people. ” Warnock was the eleventh of twelve children and the first in his family to graduate college. While studying at Morehouse College, where his tuition exceeded his father’s annual income, Warnock had caught the attention of Lawrence Carter, a professor of religion, who, among other achievements, is the dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel. Carter remembered Warnock as a skinny, studious young undergraduate who was writing a proposal for the office of the governor of Georgia. Warnock’s main interest was in preaching, and Carter recommended him to the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, in Birmingham, to work for a summer—eventually, the congregation decided to pay for the rest of Warnock’s education. After pursuing doctoral studies at Union Theological Seminary under James Cone, a central figure of Black-liberation theology, Warnock took up a series of posts at churches associated with the tradition of the Black social gospel, where, like King, he was known for political activism. As Carter put it to me, “When you honor the social gospel, it takes you out of the libraries and into the streets.” Warnock’s doctoral thesis, the basis of a book published in 2013, was about the divide in the Black church between a pietistic tradition, which emphasized individual righteousness and uplift, and a social one, epitomized by King. By the time Warnock was hired to lead Ebenezer, in 2005, strains of the pietistic tradition had consolidated in the new suburban Black megachurches that preached the prosperity gospel, led by figures such as Creflo Dollar and Bishop Eddie Long. (It’s a mark of the depth of this incursion that the 2006 funeral of Coretta Scott King took place not at Ebenezer, in inner-city Atlanta, but at Bishop Eddie Long’s church, in unincorporated Dekalb County. ) Lerone Martin, who is now a religious-studies professor and the chair of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford, was a graduate student in Atlanta at the time, and he remembers Warnock arguing on local television that the idea that “Jesus wants everybody to be rich just isn’t supported in the Bible.” Martin said, “In Atlanta, which had really become a really prominent land of the prosperity gospel, Reverend Warnock and Ebenezer kind of became a symbol that stood up to say, ‘There’s a different kind of gospel.’ ” It has been interesting to see what Republican operatives and politicians make of a figure like this. In Warnock’s first Senate campaign, two years ago, they mostly attacked him as a radical. But Warnock has largely distanced himself from the particular radical ideas or traditions that Republicans tend to invoke. In the Senate, he sponsored a bill to fund and supply rural police departments (not just funding the police, but, to a degree, militarizing them) and on the stump he is sure to praise police officers for “standing up for the rest of us, by going to dangerous places so we don’t need to.” His father was a veteran, and Warnock praises the military in similar terms: “They went to Iraq, they went to Afghanistan through successive Administrations. Sometimes the President was a Republican, sometimes the President was a Democrat. But they showed up because we sent them. ” At the most basic level, these attacks have not worked. In 2020, Warnock ran ahead of Biden (as his campaign is fond of telling reporters) in a hundred and twenty, out of a hundred and fifty-five, Georgia counties. The present election in Georgia features not just Warnock’s race but also the competition for governor, in which the conservative Republican incumbent, Brian Kemp, is facing off against the progressive . The most recent poll, conducted by the University of Georgia and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution , found Warnock leading by three points and Abrams trailing by ten; an astonishing nine per cent of Kemp’s voters planned to pull the lever for Warnock. A rule of political combat, followed by professionals of both parties, is that to attack a formidable candidate you must target his area of greatest strength, not his weakness. In recent weeks, a new, potentially fruitful line of Republican attack has consolidated. The key is a March, 2020, incident, in which Warnock went to pick up his two young children at the home of his estranged wife and, according to her, drove over her foot in his Tesla. Police, called to the scene, found no evidence of injury to her foot. But a Republican-affiliated PAC has released an ad built around police body-cam footage, in which Warnock’s now ex-wife says, “I’ve been trying to keep the way he acts under wraps for a long time, and today he crossed the line. So that is what is happening here. And he is a great actor. He is capable of putting on a really good show.” The “actor” charge cuts deep, because it gets to Warnock’s fundamental strength, his projection of authenticity. An investigation last week by the conservative Washington Free Beacon—which alleged that Ebenezer Baptist Church had not disclosed its ownership of an apartment building from which renters were being threatened in court with eviction for overdue rent, sometimes totalling less than two hundred dollars—followed a similar instinct. Preachers aren’t supposed to be actors, but every politician, by necessity, is. During their lone debate last week, Herschel Walker, who supplied the most memorable moment when he held up what looked like a fake police badge and claimed he’d been deputized, repeatedly pointed out that Warnock had voted with Biden ninety-six per cent of the time—the point being that, despite what Walker called Warnock’s “pretty words,” he was yet another loyal member of an unpopular President’s party. In his campaign commercials, Warnock plays a goofier version of himself than the one who appears on the stump; in one of his most popular ads from 2020, he appears merrily walking a beagle through a suburban neighborhood while saying that Republican attacks depicting him as an unhinged radical were a total mischaracterization. (The beagle turned out to not actually be his dog.) In press releases, his Senate office often refers to him as “Senator Reverend Warnock,” a funny mashup of his political and pastoral roles, but also a telling one. Which is he: a politician or a pastor? Warnock’s political power depends on his ability to answer “both,” and so it may come with a ticking clock. After Warnock’s dusk rally in Midway, as reporters waited for another short and slightly terse Warnock press conference—once again focussed on Walker’s past—I found myself talking on Dorchester Academy’s veranda with Luke Moses, a Hinesville lawyer in his thirties who had warmed up the crowd before Warnock appeared. Moses told me that his family has been active in Democratic politics “probably for centuries,” which meant during segregation and slavery times, too, “and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a candidate who energizes a crowd the way that Senator Warnock does.” Moses, who is white, didn’t think the trick was Warnock’s personality, or even his message, but the plainest thing about him: that his election suggested that we had “overcome some of the ugliest parts of our past.” Moses seemed very moved by all of this. He mentioned the story that Warnock often tells to close his events. At the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—and at the urging of Vice-President Kamala Harris —Warnock wrote a letter to his five-year-old daughter saying that he had just voted for a Supreme Court Justice who, for the first time in American history, “has hair like yours.” A decade ago, Moses had worked in Washington for the conservative Democratic congressman John Barrow, who represented a different way of accommodating Georgia’s political past. Moses said, “That Georgia has chosen to send the lead pastor at Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s church to the United States Senate. If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said, ‘That will never happen here in my lifetime. ’ ” Elections hinge on demographic changes, on the President’s public approval, on the strength of the economy. Most of those variables are in the Republicans’ favor in this year’s elections. And so the Democratic prospects, both for retaining the majority and for internal renewal without revolution, depend on a handful of candidates who can persuade some voters skeptical of the Party to side with them anyway. Against the machinery of discontent, the Democrats have offered talent. Same issues, same themes, but a different set of reference points, a different manner of speech. There were instances when I was on the trail with Warnock, or watching his sermons online this week, when I thought that this was the most interesting Democratic politician to emerge since Barack Obama. But, if that were the case, the crowds should have been bigger, and he should have been beating a disastrous candidate like Herschel Walker by more than a very fragile margin. As it is, the race (and perhaps control of the Senate) hinges on exactly how many moderate Republicans find Walker intolerable in the end. Warnock’s campaign understood its candidate: the setting, the precision and modesty of his policy ideas, the historical resonance—all of this was right. But this is not a romantic time in politics. All this talent mostly works on those who already believe. New Yorker Favorites .