Attacks GOP establishment

There is no love lost between Akin and the GOP establishment.

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The former lawmaker spends a fair amount of time cataloging who wronged him. Karl Rove gets plenty of ink for his comments at the Republican National Convention, where he joked to donors that “If [Akin’s] found mysteriously murdered, don’t look for my whereabouts!” Akin also dings former National Republican Senatorial Committee Executive Director Rob Jesmer in the book for allegedly pressuring a supporter to try and “persuade as many pastors as possible to sign a letter asking me to step down.”

Akin singles out Rove, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Whip John Cornyn, GOP Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Roy Blunt of Missouri, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and House Speaker John Boehner as the group of Beltway RINOs whose decisions are closely tied to which candidates are supported by Republican super PACs. Akin later calls McCain’s 2008 presidential bid a “futile effort” and describes the senator as “old, brittle, and internally angry.”

No politician frustrated Akin more than Blunt. While Blunt was “cool” to his candidacy in the GOP primary, Akin said the senator later came to embrace his run before deserting him. Akin writes that after he asked Blunt to continue supporting him, the senator not only wouldn’t stick by him, but took part in the national calls for him to quit the race.

“As I mentioned previously, Roy Blunt is good at politics and usually tries not to leave fingerprints on his handwork. This time he would leave a bloody war club with his fingerprints all over it,” Akin writes.

Akin focuses throughout the book on what he sees as the Republican establishment constantly abandoning the conservative wing of the party. “[W]e can sit on the bus (in the back!), but they don’t want us to drive the bus!,” Huckabee writes. He goes on to say that the GOP establishment “still bruised that they didn’t beat Todd in the primary, saw [the comments] as their opportunity to take him out and select someone more palatable to their tastes.”

Akin repeatedly writes that he stood up to the GOP establishment as member of the House and during his campaigns. “The Beltway Republicans hoped to remake me in their image. One place where they thought a makeover was most needed was my TV ad. In this ad, much to their consternation, the word God was mentioned, not just once but three times. They even proposed negotiating the mention of God down to once, but this, I told them, was not a subject for negotiation.”

Blames the liberal media

Akin largely blames the liberal media for using his comments on rape against him and points to examples that he believes show that the media hold Republicans to a different standard.

“I was the target of a media assassination. … So it really didn’t matter about what I said, or logic, or truth. I had mentioned ‘abortion’ and ‘rape.’ That was enough. It was simply an assassination.” He writes that it was hypocritical for the media and Democrats to use his comments as part of the “Republican war on women” narrative when two weeks later the Democratic Party cheered for Bill Clinton, “who was actually accused of sexual assault on multiple occasions,” at its convention.

In part, Akin uses the current political atmosphere and media to argue that trackers who follow candidates on the campaign trail are just looking for a candidate to slip up.

In that context, Akin defends former Virginia Gov. George Allen’s comments in 2006, when he called a tracker of Indian descent “macaca.” Allen would go on to lose to Democrat Jim Webb. The incident is even credited with dashing Allen’s national political ambitions.

“He could not possibly have known that, in the Portuguese language at least, the word means ‘monkey.’ Allen is not Portuguese … and neither was his opponent,” Akin writes.

In defending former President George W. Bush, Akin again points to the media, who along with the Democratic Party “had convinced themselves on the basis of some scattered bits of evidence that President Bush was an awkward bumbler not up to the task of leading the nation.”

He also says that the media — even Republican columnists like The New York Times’ David Brooks and The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan — essentially gave then-candidate Barack Obama a pass. “But other than Obama’s Senate record and his hard left background, the media and our Republican elite assured us there was nothing to worry about. … Unfortunately, by yelling, ‘Racism!’ every time anyone criticized the president’s policies, Obama’s fellow Democrats and their allies in the media have only aggravated racial tensions.”