Herschel Walker defeat produces amazing disaster quote

The campaign from former NCAA/USFL/NFL player Herschel Walker for a Senate seat in Georgia produced a lot of remarkable moments. But one of the most insane quotations on it only came out after Walker’s loss to incumbent Democratic senator Raphael Warnock in a run-off election Tuesday.

Following that loss, as part of an analysis of what went wrong for Walker, Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution got an incredible quote from an adviser to state Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, who lost to Walker in the Republican primary. Here’s that quote:

“Herschel was like a plane crash into a train wreck that rolled into a dumpster fire. And an orphanage. Then an animal shelter. You kind of had to watch it squinting through one eye between your fingers,” said Dan McLagan, an adviser to Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, one of Walker’s defeated rivals in the GOP primary.

That is quite the disaster to imagine indeed. Here are a few GIFs that may help with the visualization of it:

While there’s some obvious bias to consider here, with McLagan being an advisor to a candidate Walker (seen above at a Nov. 18 campaign stop) defeated in the GOP primary, there’s also some merit to these remarks. The gaffes Walker committed over this campaign are certainly notable. And it’s easy to envision a less-controversial Republican candidate or even one who didn’t trip over his own feet as much, performing better.

It’s notable too that this piece from Bluestein includes some quotes from inside the Walker campaign. And many of those support McLagan’s analysis from the outside:

Inside the Republican’s campaign, aides lurched from crisis to crisis so often it felt like a “death march,” said one staffer, one of a half-dozen Walker allies who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the inner workings of the operation.

Yeah, a “death march” probably isn’t what you want your own staffers to compare your campaign to. The jury is out on if that is worse or better than a “plane crash into a train wreck that rolled into a dumpster fire. And an orphanage. Then an animal shelter,” though. And regardless of what’s ahead, that quote is headed for the Quotations Hall of Fame.

[The Atlanta Journal-Constitution]; photo from Richard Burkhart/The Savannah Morning News, via USA Today]