The Missouri race for the U.S. Senate is a lesson in what's wrong with single-issue politics

Many want to see Rep Todd Akin, member of the U.S. House of Representatives lose his race against incumbent U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill solely because of Akin's idiotic statement about "legitimate rape" and that doctors had told him women don't get pregnant when they are raped.

Why is rape, suddenly the most important issue in a race for a U.S. Senate seat, where most of the federal issues about abortion are already settled.  There is little if any chance that the Congress will reverse itself and provide federal funding for abortion.  That ban has been around for a long time, and there is little reason to suspect the factors that created the ban have altered in any way, except perhaps to be even more intense than ever.

There's no hope or reason to believe that a "Freedom of Choice" act will pass the Congress.  Roe v Wade is the law of the land in all 50 states, thanks to the Supreme Court.  That's not going to change either. 

So why is rape such a crucial issue?  The big issues should be the economy, the loss of U.S. jobs through economic change and outsourcing, government spending more than a trillion dollars in each of the past four years than it took in, and the fact that future entitlement spending projections make multi-trillion dollar deficits nearly inevitable.

Instead of looking at the candidates on all the issues, there is a firestorm going on, demanding that Akin lose because he said one thing about one issue.  Hey, Akin is an idiot, and if you want to question his general intellectual fitness to be in office because of this one statement fine.  But then you need to question the general intellectual fitness of Vice-President Joe Biden to be elected to another term as VP, given that he's still convinced we're living in the 20th Century, and that "jobs" is a three-letter word.  Usually I want politicians to be able to count to at least ten before they can earn my vote.  When they can't differentiate between three and four...

I think back to a lesson of history about a U.S. Senate race that was pretty much a single issue rate.  It took place in 1958, before I was born, in West Virginia.  Robert Byrd was then a member of the House, running for the Senate against a Republican incumbent by the name of W. Chapman Revercomb, who was running for his third term.

The key issue was civil rights and Revercomb's support of them.  Byrd, who at one time was a KKK member, opposed civil rights, and that was the reason he won election to the U.S. Senate.  As a result, he was able to take part in the famouse filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, trying to prevent passage of this landmark legislation.  That he later in life repudiated his former racism is worthy of forgiveness, but not complete absolution or erasure from the historical record.

Pretend for a moment you're a Republican, voting in a primary election to choose a candidate for the U.S. Senate.  One of the candidates is a radical right-wing religious zealot, who opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, but is completely in line with your views on reducing the deficit, shrinking government, building the economy and everything else, save those two hot-button issues for you.  Now his opponent is a white supremacist, who is pro-choice, and surprisingly, in favor of same-sex marriage.  But he likes big government, regulating business (he considers it to be "sticking it to the Zionist pigs") and wants to borrow and spend massively on a military build-up.

Who do you vote for?  Of course, you hold your nose firmly and write-in the name of some other Republican on the primary ballot.  Or you just avoid voting altogether.  Or, do you, because the first candidate represents all of your beliefs except abortion and same-sex marriage, do you hold your nose firmly and tightly and recognize that in the Senate, they can't negatively impact those two issues all that greatly to begin with?

Hey, were I in charge, Akin would be out of the race, some other Republican whose views on abortion are clear, well-stated, and possibly similar to Akins, without managing to piss off everyone with a womb from coast to coast, would be McCaskill's opponent.  But I'm not in charge.  I'm just wondering about the wisdom of choosing your elected representative solely on the basis of their position on one issue.  Even when it's an important issue, although their ability to create change on how that issue is handled, is it worth it?