What are we to make of Missouri Republican Todd Akin’s refusal to give in to the nearly-universal pleas of leading Republican to abandon his race for the Senate after his bizarre and offensive comments about rape?
Among many others, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney publicly called on Akin to withdraw. Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan phoned Akin with the same advice.
But Akin remains remarkably defiant.
“The people of Missouri chose me to be their candidate. And I don’t believe it’s right for party bosses to decide to override those voters,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
In fact Akin has received support since his remarks from such social conservative groups as the Family Research Council and the American Family Association.
And Akin’s claim that rape victims have some sort of biological mechanism to prevent pregnancy is hardly exclusive to him. Garance Franke-Ruta writes:
[H]is comments were hardly some kind never-before-heard gaffe. Arguments like his have cropped up again and again on the right over the past quarter century and the idea that trauma is a form of birth control continues to be promulgated by anti-abortion forces that seek to outlaw all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest. The push for a no-exceptions anti-abortion policy has for decades gone hand in hand with efforts to downplay the frequency with which rape- or incest-related pregnancies occur, and even to deny that they happen, at all. In other words, it’s not just Akin singing this tune.
As for Akin’s reference to “legitimate rape”: clearly that was an awkward attempt to distinguish between what he considers genuine cases of rape and more questionable cases. But as Talking Points Memo explains:
[T]hat’s really just another way of phrasing what Congressional Republicans [including Akin and Ryan] tried to put into law last year when they attempted to revise federal law on abortion to refer not to “rape” but only to “forcible rape” or, to translate, what the authors of the proposed law think of as real rape.
And now we have a situation in which Romney and Ryan have said— in response to Akin– that they do not oppose abortion in cases of rape, while the Republican party platform supports a ban on abortion with no exceptions.
So what’s going on within the GOP? I think a lot of it has to do with something I’ve highlighted here before: the tension between a generally privileged wing of the party for whom economic issues are paramount and a generally less well-off wing of conservative Christians who are primarily concerned with opposing abortion, same-sex marriage and other threats to what they consider traditional family values.
While these conservative “values” voters are by no means a majority of the population, they are absolutely key to Republican success in many states.
With only some exaggeration, conservative writer Tucker Carlson observed:
“The people who run the Republican Party are elites just like any other elite, and they don’t share the same cultural concerns as the center of the country. They don’t — they’re all pro-choice on abortion, they’re all pro-gay rights, they’re all thrice married, you know what I mean? And they summer in the Hamptons, too. And so they don’t have anything in common, that’s true, with evangelicals who make up the bulk of their party.”
Observing the tension between the two sides in a Colorado Senate primary a few years ago, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne asked a good question:
Do conservative politicians who care primarily about taxes and the interests of big business merely use “conservative values” as a slogan for attracting votes from the less well-off who gain little or nothing from their economic programs?
Consider that tax breaks for big corporations and the very wealthy get enacted into law while amendments to outlaw abortion and gay marriage get little more than extensive lip service.
So I think Todd Akin’s defiance of the “party bosses,” however long it lasts, represents in part a refusal of the Republicans’ social-conservative wing to be played for fools anymore by the now-panicking business-oriented wing– even if it ends up hurting Republican chances in November.
Update: Case in point:
St. Louis-based Emerson Electric has been the biggest corporate financial backer of Rep. Todd Akin’s U.S. Senate campaign, but no more.
“We backed Todd Akin as a candidate who would help restore the U.S. economy. Given his recent comments, we no longer support his candidacy,” Emerson spokesman Mark Polzin said today.
Further update: Former Arkansas Gov. Mick Huckabee has come out strongly on the side of Todd Akin and against the Republican leaders who want him to quit the race for Senate.
From the spotlights of political offices and media perches, it may appear that the demand for Akin’s head is universal in the party. I assure you it is not. There is a vast, but mostly quiet army of people who have an innate sense of fairness and don’t like to see a fellow political pilgrim bullied. If Todd Akin loses the Senate seat, I will not blame Todd Akin. He made his mistake, but was man enough to admit it and apologize. I’m waiting for the apology from whoever the genius was on the high pedestals of our party who thought it wise to not only shoot our wounded, but run over him with tanks and trucks and then feed his body to the liberal wolves.
Wow.
