Mitt Romney to Todd Akin: ‘Exit the Senate Race’ (latimes.com)
Republican Party approves strict anti-abortion platform (boston.com)

Going into this year’s election, one of the Republicans’ strongest assets should have been the vaunted “enthusiasm gap,” the difference in voter enthusiasm between the two major parties. The Obama presidency has yet to yield the kind of mass transformations that his “Change We Can Believe In” campaign of four years ago promised, and Democrats suffered such huge losses in 2010 that they mostly erased the gains they’d made in the previous two national elections. Republicans, on the other hand, are still very energized even after their big victories in the midterm election, and say what you will about their talking heads, but they know how to fire up their base. The combination of an energized Republican base and demoralized Democrats would be enough to increase the chances of Republican victory (if not an outright landslide) in a year that already tilts in their favour in several key ways.

Democrats were looking at a very hard task in trying to close that enthusiasm gap. It’s always easier to court enthusiasm when you’re a challenger in an election, and whatever boost Obama may have gotten from the possibility of being the first African-American president in 2008 is severely diminished by the fact that now he is the first African-American president, so winning re-election this year won’t be nearly as momentous. (Romney now has that advantage as potentially our first Mormon president.) Last month when Democrats voted to include support for same-sex marriage in their national party platform, it was a calculated risk. Gay rights are one of those issues that fires up both sides, but with support for same-sex marriage hovering around 50%, it was probably a very shrewd move for Democrats to push this issue. Because right-wingers were already so fired up about the election, lighting a flame under both sides meant that their base would rise higher since they had more room to rise. (Supporting same-sex marriage also helps to ease the sting of Obama taking longer than promised to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.) It’s a move that probably works to close the gap, and thus give them a better chance of victory come November.

Similarly, Republicans would be wise to avoid issues that tend to incite wide swaths of both parties since they don’t need to push their base to the polls nearly as much as Democrats do. I don’t think there’s any question that abortion is one of those hot button issues that gets voters on both sides really riled, and since their 2010 victories Republicans have been doing so much on both the state and federal levels to restrict abortion that it’s fueled a significant “Republican War on Women” rhetoric on the left that has served to re-energize Democrats and one of their key constituencies. Perhaps this is one of those issues that Republicans feel transcends political strategy, much like some of us on the far left believe legislation guaranteeing equality should be pushed through regardless of the backlash that might follow. When Republicans took power at the start of 2011 they were also facing an uncertain 2012 forecast — if the economy had recovered more fully than it has now, Democrats would likely be more enthusiastic about the election — so a year and a half ago there was a wisdom in Republicans pushing abortion as a hedge against Democrats getting back on track before the election, a wisdom that doesn’t seem nearly as applicable now.

When Republican Senatorial candidate Todd Akin of Missouri claimed this past Sunday that rape survivors have a way to “shut that whole thing down,” i.e. biologically prevent themselves from getting pregnant, if what they survived was a “legitimate rape,” he may have done more to close the enthusiasm gap for Democrats this year than the Democratic Party could have ever dreamed of doing. Not only did it push abortion to the forefront of the election — not just in Missouri but the whole nation — but it did so in such a horrendously tone-deaf way that Republicans couldn’t possibly benefit from it in any appreciable way, to the point where pretty much every leading right-wing figure, from Mitt Romney to Sean Hannity, was forced to call on Akin to withdraw from a race that had been Republicans’ best hope of stealing a Senate seat. (The Democratic incumbent, Claire McCaskill, hardly has a cakewalk to November now, but her chances of retaining her seat have shot way up.)

Although the abortion rights debate has always been a very heated one, with close and sometimes very elastic poll numbers, opposition to legal abortion for survivors of rape and incest has always been low. However strongly you may feel about what constitutes “life,” rhetorically it’s very difficult to convince people that a rape survivor should be forced to carry a pregnancy that results from rape to term. particularly given the deep trauma the survivor has already had to go through. I’m not even sure there’s a right way to go about that argument, but there are certainly wrong ways. In the 2010 midterm election I was nauseated when Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Harry Reid’s Senate seat in Nevada, actually compared a rape survivor carrying the rape-induced pregnancy to term as turning “a lemon situation into lemonade.” That would be a hard enough comparison to justify on paper, but if you listen to the way Angle says it you can almost see the smile on her face while she’s talking. That made her sound incredibly unsympathetic to the ordeals of rape survivors, and I believe that if Angle hadn’t handed Senator Reid this gift to drive Nevada women to the polls then Angle would be the junior senator from Nevada right now. (Like McCaskill this year, Reid’s seat was considered the easiest for Republicans to pick off before the 2010 election.)

Even if you ignore how head-slappingly wrong Akin is on the biological facts of the issue, to frame it in the context of “legitimate rape” is horrendously insulting to women, because there’s a pretty clear assumption there that if a woman does get pregnant from her rapist then she wasn’t “really” raped. Perhaps there was a time in America where “women are just asking for it anyway” was a viable political argument, but I’m pretty sure that time passed long ago. There are undoubtedly a handful of people who can be appealed to with that argument, but if you’ve got Sean Hannity calling on you to leave a race then that handful’s got to be pretty small. What’s worse is that Akin isn’t even the first elected Republican to make such a biologically false claim about female rape survivors being able to prevent getting pregnant by their rapist, as was pointed out by Funny or Die’s “Republicans, Get In My Vagina!” video from this past spring. (Please watch it if you haven’t already done so; if we don’t laugh a little at this nonsense then our heads may explode.)

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have publicly distanced themselves from Akin’s comments, but both of them have previously expressed support for giving fertilized eggs the full legal rights of human beings (“personhood” as it’s usually referred to in politics), which would effectively criminalize all abortions regardless of circumstances, and Ryan even co-authored personhood bills in the House of Representatives with Akin. Shifting back to supporting abortion rights for survivors of rape and incest is smart tactically, but it also raises the problem of Romney making two very large and very public about faces on abortion in less than ten years. Remember Republicans holding up thousands of flip-flops to ridicule John Kerry at their 2004 convention? The fact that their convention in Tampa next week won’t mention whether or not rape and incest survivors should have access to abortion isn’t going to help Romney and Ryan either.

For all that Republicans want to see a new Ronald Reagan in Mitt Romney, this is going to be a true test of whether or not Romney has any of that legendary Reagan teflon on his political self. If his distancing himself from Akin manages to work with voters, then he’ll only have to deal with a smaller enthusiasm gap than he was facing before. If Democrats and the Obama campaign can keep Akin’s words echoing in voters’ heads until election day, though, the road to Obama’s re-election just got a lot less bumpy.