Top Republicans Tell Akin He Should Withdraw
The most significant item in this story is Karl Rove's suggestion that he will no longer run anti-McCaskill advertising in Missouri if Akin stays in. The Missouri Senate seat has been considered among the most vulnerable to a Republican gain, and the right-wing PACs have been buying large quantities of advertising time to
attack McCaskill. (You may notice a certain homogeneity among the people who speak in the second of those ads.) If Akin continues to stay in, as he claims he will do, and the big PACs pull out, it will be a major victory for Democrats seeking to retain control of the Senate. The only good thing about this debacle for the Republicans is that it is happening now rather than in October when less-informed voters will start to pay attention to the election.
Republican Senate candidate George Allen, who is also mentioned in the
Times article as encouraging Akin to withdraw, knows whereof he speaks. His calling a staffer for now-Senator James Webb a "
macaca" contributed to his losing the Virginia Senate race in 2006.
The fact that Akin and intended Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan have
collaborated on other anti-abortion measures with similarly absurd concepts like "
forcible rape" has only started to creep into public consciousness. (Yesterday New York
Times columnist Maureen Dowd likened the notion of "nonforcible rape" to "nonlethal murder.")
Last night the Romney/Ryan campaign said only that the candidates believed rape was an acceptable grounds for abortion, but Ryan's own espoused positions on the subject are much less tolerant. He has been a major force behind so-called "personhood" laws which would define life as beginning at conception. This would define almost any abortion for whatever reason as murder, along with morning-after pills like RU486. Today Romney himself took a much harder stance against Akin's claims calling them “insulting, inexcusable and, frankly, wrong.”
I've written more about the Akin case
here,
here and
here.