His name has now become a slur for supposedly unelectable Republican candidates. A pejorative title for “crazed” conservatives that liberals love to laugh off.
But he hasn’t let the hate hold him back from returning to the media spotlight.
Yes, Todd Akin is back, and he has written a new book — “Firing Back” — which slams his own party’s establishment and makes no apologies for his past controversial statements.
Akin was the Republican candidate for the open U.S. Senate seat in Missouri when he made his now infamous “legitimate rape” comments. It cost him the election and saw his own party turn against him as he became a scapegoat for the national party to criticize candidates they deemed too conservative.
In an phone interview with The Daily Caller, the former congressman called his statement a “poor choice of words” and stated that the party let him know very shortly that Akin was on his own in the campaign.
“They really just didn’t think I had any kind of chance and they weren’t going to stand with me anymore,” Akin told TheDC.
But he felt that this fit in a pattern of the establishment having a negative view of the primaries — and their own party base.
“They have this attitude where they should select people and not elect them. They spend a tremendous amount of money in primaries on the premise that the primary voters in the Republican Party are too stupid to pick the right candidate,” Akin declared.
“It’s insulting and it’s going to create an increased divide within the party. All the people who are great Republicans and stand for the Republican Party platform are going to be alienated and turned off by those tactics,” Akin continued.
But he added that they don’t like him because “I’m calling them out on that.”
He also hit back at his name becoming synonymous with unelectability, stating that he was elected multiple times prior to his 2012 loss.
“I was elected for 24 years as a solid conservative. I was elected over and over again with good majorities,” the former Missouri representative explained. “So I don’t think I’m an example of somebody who can’t win and my loss in 2012 was precipitated heavily by the direct attacks of the Republican Party leadership on our campaign.”
He sees a parallel with what happened to him in 2012 to what’s happened to Chris McDaniel in the Mississippi Senate primary.
“This is terrible, terrible tactics. They’ve spent a ton of money to try to beat Chris McDaniel, they’ve antagonized half of the Republicans in Mississippi or more, and they’ve wasted money so they’re not in a strong position to go forward in the general election,” Akin explained.
“There’s arrogance here. The party bosses — Karl Rove and company — want to pick their candidates. They are not content to let the process of the public be able to choose — through a primary — their candidate. They really don’t trust American voters, they don’t trust the Republican Party to elect the right people.”
He says that Republicans are cowards when it comes to defending their own against attacks from the left and have “a habit of leaving their wounded on the battlefield.”
“That wasn’t true in my case — they tried to come back and finish me off,” Akin said.
He said that this fear of defending their own who stray from the party line comes from the power that the left exerts through America’s media.
“There’s a fear on the part of the Republicans of the tremendous weapon of the Democrats and the elite liberal media, and the fact that they can target somebody for just the mere poor choice of words and take them from a respected Congressman to the worst bum in the world in matter of a week,” he said.
“They’re not only doing media assassinations, but they’re coupling that with a censorship of truth,” Akin continued. “It’s not even a dual standard! This is a violation of the sacred trust of the public. It’s an intentional decision to advance a very anti-American agenda.”
He called out the Democrats for attacking him for his statements, while standing by Bill Clinton, who has a long record of being accused of sexual misconduct (which Akin defined as sexual assault), and his wife, Hillary. Akin cited Hillary’s defense of a child rapist when she was a practicing attorney — whom she felt was guilty — but still relentlessly undermined the character of the accuser during the trial in order to attain a more favorable sentence for her client.
“People may say they’re offended, but what are you really offended by? Someone who gets a rapist off the hook and laughs about it, or some words that are said? Who are we kidding?” Akin asserted.
He also criticized the GOP for adopting a message that wasn’t appealing to the American public, and shared his own opinion for what a candidate should do when deciding to run for office.
“They chose a message very carefully so they could defend it. But it was a very poor message because it wasn’t something that was going to generate any passion, love or patriotism in the hearts of Americans,” Akin said.
“The tactical point is this: you can never advance good ideas if you are afraid to fight bad ideas,” he commented. “The best campaign is one that stands for truth, and you can explain exactly why you believe what you believe and stand up for what America has always stood for. So you start by doing the right thing, and trust God to do the rest.”