“With Kevin Cramer, North Dakota has its own Todd Akin”

(BISMARCK, ND) – Kevin Cramer continues to make headlines with his insensitive comments on sexual assault.

WDAY: With Kevin Cramer, North Dakota has its own Todd Akin
By Mike McFeely

  • It took six years, but North Dakota finally has its own Todd Akin. Um … congratulations?
  • Akin was a Missouri Republican who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012 and had a good chance to win. That is, until he tried to mansplain his views on why he opposed abortion even in the case of rape. He said doctors told him women rarely get pregnant when they’re raped and anyway, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
  • Akin was skewered. Republicans were embarrassed. He lost. The voters spoke: Rape is rape. Todd, meet Kevin. That would be Kevin Cramer, Republican U.S. Senate candidate from North Dakota. Cramer is locked in a tight race against incumbent Heidi Heitkamp, and he believes undying support for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will win him votes.
  • Kevin has spent the past several days saying that even if Kavanaugh did sexually assault the woman who made the first accusation against him, meh, what’s the big deal? […] And, in a coup de grace to his empathy to women, Cramer implied that a good girl wouldn’t have been at the party where she says Kavanaugh assaulted her.
  • Cramer’s first Akin-like moment came on a radio show last week when he called the accusation “absurd” because, “These are teenagers who evidently were drunk, according to her own statement. Again, it was supposedly an attempt or something that never went anywhere.”
  • On Berg’s show, Cramer dismissed the accusation because “there was no type of intercourse or anything like that.” Naive man, Kevin. He’s blissfully unaware of attempted rape or other types of sexual assault. Sexual assault in Cramer’s world, apparently, must be done by a sober adult male who penetrates a sober adult female with his penis. If those involved are teenagers or drinking or the assault doesn’t include intercourse, that doesn’t count.
  • Kevin, meet Todd.

See more:

CNN: GOP Senate candidate on Kavanaugh accuser: ‘I mean, how many 15-year-olds handle a lot of alcohol?’

MSNBC: GOP’s Cramer lands in a ditch, finds a shovel, digs deeper

  • As for the bigger picture, let’s not forget Cramer’s rhetorical history. As we discussedyesterday, it’s a record that includes making derogatory comments about Democratic women’s attire and an unfortunate defense of Alabama’s Roy Moore.
  • In April 2017, CNN quoted a Senate GOP campaign veteran who saidat the time, “On paper, it looks like he could win, but he also appears to have a few Akin-like tendencies that make a lot of people nervous.”
  • A year and a half later, perhaps those concerns were well grounded?

NDxPlains: Cramer Struggles to Clarify Comments

  • Rather than apologizing for his lack of empathy for the alleged victim and others like her, Cramer has more than doubled down. Instead, he blamed others for diminishing the seriousness of the allegations. Given the chance to say he perhaps misspoke and acknowledge – at the very least- that he could see how his word choice created an uproar, he blamed media for using his exact words directly in spoken form.
  • Though Cramer’s latest remarks are the most jaw-dropping, they aren’t out of character. In 2013, he made headlines for his comments at the Spirit Lake Reservation regarding the recently reauthorized Violence Against Women Act. Last year, he said “there is a disease associated” with women members of Congress wearing white suites. Months later, he called a female TV talk show host a “snob.” This pattern demonstrates why he is struggling to clarify his comments because he may have meant what he said in the first place.

The Hill: Cramer questions if allegations should disqualify Kavanaugh ‘even if it’s all true’

Politico: Cramer questions whether Kavanaugh assault allegation is disqualifying — even if true

NBC News: ‘Even if it’s all true’: GOP Senate candidate questions if Kavanaugh allegations disqualify him

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