Photography by AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Christian Gooden
I blew it.
Two years ago, I had the opportunity to claim intellectual property rights to Rep. Todd Akin’s intellectual properties, calling him “wacko” long before it was widely fashionable to do so. I did so in a May 2010 SLM column headlined “Be Still My Akin Heart: The Strangeness of American Politics on Display in St. Louis.”
If only I could have registered the term somehow. I could have been somebody—a respected Akinologist, if you will—when our hometown boy became internationally infamous for his observation that a woman’s body holds a mystical power to “shut down” the reproductive process and avoid pregnancy after a “legitimate rape.”
The column wasn’t groundbreaking: It merely reported upon Akin’s 15 minutes of fame as fodder for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart over another unhinged comment he’d made on the floor of the House of Representatives. Then, Akin cried out to God “for His help supernaturally so that we don’t make this fatal step pushing our nation into socialized medicine.”
Yes, Akin indeed invoked the Rapture—Stewart gleefully called it “the R-word”—to ward off the evil of Obamacare. That was bonkers enough to earn him fleeting national note (although this background somehow escaped recollection when the political world was deluged with the Great Akin Flood of 2012).
But there was more to know about Akin, such as the fact that he had sponsored just one bill in 12 years of service: the strange, irrelevant Pledge Protection Act, which would have barred federal courts from considering any case with constitutional issues that might be raised with respect to the Pledge of Allegiance.
Mercifully, the bill came nowhere near passage, but its existence might have served as one more cautionary tale about its author. This guy is out there.
In the column, I documented that Akin’s 2nd District was not nearly so conservative as Democrats seemed to think. It seemed absurd for Dems to have conceded the seat to an unaccomplished man known mostly for a far-right voting record and even further-right rhetoric.
I called out the Democratic Party for failing to mount a single seriously funded candidate against Akin over more than a decade. I even challenged the Tea Party to challenge Akin in light of his loyal support of the budget-busting Iraq War and all things Boeing (that would be his second-largest career campaign contributor) and his affinity for political pork.
To my astonishment, neither the Democratic Party nor the Tea Party paid any heed to my vision. So it was in vain that I had attempted to lead the first dump-Akin movement, 27 months before the rest of the world joined in.
Ironically, it turns out that the only party I didn’t urge to oppose Akin—the Republican Party—was most responsible for ending his 12-year reign in Congress. Missouri went through redistricting last year (its congressional delegation having been reduced from nine to eight as a result of the 2010 Census), and while most attention to the redrawing of districts was focused on the Democrats’ family feud between Reps. Russ Carnahan and Lacy Clay, GOP insiders quietly moved district boundaries, reducing the number of evangelicals to make the district winnable for longtime favorite Ann Wagner.
It’s believed in political circles—albeit not publicly—that Akin’s U.S. Senate bid was prompted by the prospect of facing a tough primary fight with Wagner over his previously safe seat. If only I had been prescient enough to call for that.
Akin went on to score a huge upset in the three-way Republican senatorial primary, fueled by a base that is the rightest-of-the-right in the Missouri GOP, which is saying something. That emboldened Akin to be Akin.
This would pose an epic problem for the Republican Party.
Akin is refreshingly unhandled, unscripted, and uncompromising. With a campaign managed by family members—positioned proudly outside the GOP mainstream—the candidate set out to unseat Sen. Claire McCaskill by doing what he has always done: just being himself.
Isn’t that what the media and the voters always say they want? Be genuine. Keep it real. Don’t give us spin. Tell it like it is.
What you see is what you get with Todd Akin.
So it came to pass—in an otherwise innocuous interview with KTVI–TV’s Charles Jaco—that Akin simply said what he believed regarding his reasons for wanting abortion outlawed without exceptions. Akin restated a long-held (albeit twisted) view from the furthest-right reaches of the anti-abortion movement, which is that if abortion is outlawed, there’s no need for a rape exception, because women don’t get pregnant by “forcible” or “legitimate” rape. The rest is history—as in American political history.
The phrase “legitimate rape” was blasted around the planet by Twitter, other social media, Internet news sites of every description, and 24/7 cable news networks. This, in turn, set off a global chain reaction of indignation, with each tweet and comment determined to outdo the next in its expression of outrage, featuring nonstop demands—mostly, it seemed, from Republicans—for Akin to withdraw from the race.
At press time, there were still calls for Akin to vaporize politically, but it seemed unlikely that he would oblige them by the time you’re reading this. God called upon him to run this race—or so says Akin—and no less a messenger than pastor Mike Huckabee urged him to stay in it.
It’s hard to imagine that this self-described man of faith would cast aside his divinely inspired quest to satisfy the political strategies of the very mainstream Republicans he vanquished to get this far. The worldview that informs Akin’s politics could hardly be expected to yield to appeals for reason and moderation.
It might have been different if Akin had committed a scandal. But he just said what he thought. Yes, he spent a couple of days trying to walk the comments back toward the sane world, but he certainly had no intention, for example, of toning down his fervent opposition to all abortions for any reason.
Akin is unfit, not untrustworthy.
This set the stage for one of the grandest political miscalculations of all time: Party regulars, starting from the top with the GOP presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, made a terrible assumption that Akin could be publicly pushed, shamed, or otherwise hustled off the stage.
Romney said Akin’s views “cannot be defended,” and he and Ryan put their considerable prestige behind demands—yes, demands—that Akin leave the ticket for the good of his party and country. So did a wide range of national Republican leaders and commentators. It didn’t work.
Karl Rove and key major funders clumsily played the money card, openly threatening to cut off tens of millions of dollars in anti-McCaskill spending if he didn’t resign his candidacy. (Many still believe that even if Akin continues to defy them, the funders will find some way to funnel attack dollars to the state.)
At home, the lions of the party seemed sadly toothless as well. In an extraordinary joint statement, Sen. Roy Blunt joined four former senators—Jack Danforth, Kit Bond, John Ashcroft, and Jim Talent—in urging Akin to leave the race, again citing the intertwined good of nation and party. Again, no dice.
So what does it all mean? In political terms, time will tell whether Akin’s stubbornness will cost Republicans Missouri’s Senate seat and even its electoral votes, and either alternative would have huge national ramifications. Akin was Sen. Claire McCaskill’s opponent of choice before his political meltdown: She had bodaciously invested in ads in the GOP primary to weaken his opponents and strengthen him with faux-attacks that he was “too conservative.” If McCaskill can’t beat Akin after his alienation of all moderate people on earth, she wasn’t meant to win.
But the long-term significance, for politicians of all stripes, is this: You had better learn to function differently in the Digital Age of the 21st century. The Internet has revolutionized human communication as much as the printing press did, and for all its wondrous potential, the lightning speed and vast scope of the Web can have lethal consequences when used precipitously.
In any other election cycle in American history (save possibly the last one), Akin’s faux pas probably would have remained a Missouri story with little national impact. Without Twitter and other social media, GOP Senate candidates from unrelated races in faraway states wouldn’t have felt compelled to advise Akin to leave his race. The whole world wouldn’t have been expected to offer a snap opinion, in real time, not just regarding Akin’s comments, but also to the viral question of whether he should stay in the race.
Political operatives probably would have held meetings and concluded that private pressure on Akin—ranging from Romney to the money men—would have been a more judicious strategy than cornering a zealot under glaring worldwide strobe lights. They might have taken into account that the decision about Akin’s future was Akin’s to make, exclusively.
To borrow a sports analogy, the Internet has speeded up the game of national politics as never before. Any great athlete will tell you that the key to success is slowing the game down.
That’s the lasting lesson to be learned—for all sides of the spectrum—from this saga: The rules of engagement have officially changed, especially when dealing with someone who is a bit out to lunch.
And this much we know for sure: Todd Akin is meshuggeneh.
Please credit me if you repeat that line.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
