If you are trapped in a room with Newt Gingrich and he tells you that you have a “moral obligation” to do something, what is your best move? What if the room is, as it was for certain listeners, in an Italian restaurant in Missouri, and he is telling you that you must support Todd Akin—the Senate candidate who, this summer, started talking about “legitimate rape”—saying that it would be “historically irrational” for you not to, and you have the distinct sense that he is about to start talking about the elections of the eighteen-sixties if something isn’t done?

If all this had been said in August, there would be many other rooms for Republicans to go to; that’s when most of the Party was pressuring Akin to leave the race, on the assumption that voters would not deem a man who had said that there is a mystery switch in women’s bodies that keeps rape victims from getting pregnant fit to serve in the Senate. (They might have noticed that he was already on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee in the House.) And Democrats were openly hoping that he would stay in the race, for the same reason—they thought that his awfulness was their best hope for holding onto the seat, since the incumbent, Claire McCaskill, was trailing in the polls. Akin said that he wasn’t leaving, and that he could win; he didn’t, and he just might.

The people in that Italian restaurant were more than willingly there: they had paid five hundred dollars each to hear Gingrich, who was there to support Akin, and also went with him to what the Los Angeles Times described as a “historic train station”—a very Gingrichian backdrop. They are not isolated, either. On Tuesday, the deadline for Akin to get off the ballot passed. On Wednesday, Senators Jim DeMint and Roy Blunt said that they would support him; so did Rick Santorum, who, with DeMint, is now raising money for Akin. More money may come. [Update: More comments from Akin raising questions about his views of women have arrived, too: he said that McCaskill had not been “ladylike” in her debate with him, and acted instead like a “wildcat”—whatever that means.]

For many of the Republicans who backed away from Akin, the problem was never abortion—Paul Ryan’s views on when abortion should be allowed (pretty much never, unless a woman might die) were close to Akin’s, and Romney’s position is only slightly broader (with allowances for rape and incest). The problem was that he could make them look bad. Now the question that matters more to the G.O.P. is: Who can take the Senate? Who is left to care about what it means if Akin is in there? If he is, the discourse on abortion will have moved with him, and not in a way that will be helpful for advocates of choice, or, for that matter, of science. So will the parameters of the politically irrational—we will all, in effect, be trapped in a room with Newt Gingrich, and may find that he isn’t even the one making the least sense.