Stuck with Akin

Some vacation travel kept me from posting on the Todd Akin situation when it first broke. I have nothing to add on the policy or physiological aspects of his comments, but I did want to comment on the parties perspective. The Republican Party establishment, broadly speaking, has made no secret of its desire to dump him as their nominee for the Missouri Senate race, but they've been unsuccessful in convincing him to bow out. I was kind of struck by this comment from GOP consultant Mike Murphy:

Moments like this – when a buffoon candidate needs to be sacked and dropped off at the state line – make me miss the old time pol[itical] bosses.

One can certainly sympathize with Murphy on this, but the comment seems a bit misguided. For one thing, it's a stretch to say that the "old time political bosses" had the power to dump nominees who became embarrassments. Yes, party bosses had a great deal of power to hand pick candidates and secure their nomination by controlling nominating conventions. But once a nominee had been selected, it was no small thing to remove them, which is why selecting the right nominee has always been such a crucial task. An Akin situation 150 years ago likely would have had similar results. It's not like some party boss would have kidnapped or murdered him. (I very much doubt that the kind of political violence portrayed in "Gangs of New York" was ever widespread in the United States, even in mid-1800s New York City.)

Of course, then as now, the party does have ways of getting an embarrassing nominee to step aside, but this is a negotiation, rather than an order. One way a party can get a candidate to abandon the race is by offering something valuable in return. A candidate could be offered another post, perhaps at a later time, in exchange for dropping out. In the case of Akin, the party really doesn't have anything to offer him. He gave up his House seat to run for Senate, so it's this or nothing. And the party has already labeled him toxic, so it's not like they want him in another public office. Besides, as far as Akin's concerned, if he steps down now, he'll always be remembered as the ignorant sexist who was forced out of the race. If he manages to win the seat, at least he has a shot at mitigating that reputation with a reasonably productive Senate career.

Another way a party can get a candidate to drop out is to threaten that he'll never work in party politics again if he doesn't do what they say. But that's pretty meaningless in this case, since it's already clear that Akin will never work in Republican Party politics again, unless he somehow wins this Senate seat. So he's got little incentive to drop out, and the party has little with which to entice or threaten him.

One sort of thing a strong party boss might do is to just abandon the nominee and back another party's candidate. This isn't something that just happened back in the days of the strong bosses. It's actually precisely what happened in Colorado in 2010 when GOP elites rallied around American Constitution Party nominee Tom Tancredo for governor rather than their own party's nominee, Dan Maes. And this may yet end up happening in Missouri.

Short of that, though, most of what the party can do is just cut off Akin and make a very public stance of doing so.


(h/t Kim Yi Dionne)