American politics aren’t merely an endless horserace as many pundits seem to think it is, but you don’t get to effect real change unless you wind up in the winner’s circle. Claire McCaskill, Democratic Senator in the red state of Missouri, realized this when running for reelection in 2012. In a Politico piece she penned, McCaskill confirms something suspected at the time: She consciously and audaciously helped the most extreme and defeatable GOP opponent, Todd Akin, win the Republican nomination, giving herself the best chance of general-election victory. She even advised Akin about which of his TV ads were working and should be continued. “This was the most fun I’d had in a long time,” she writes.

It was a risky gambit since the state could have been left with a wingnut nonpareil in the Senate, but it worked. Not even McCaskill could have anticipated Akin’s “legitimate rape” comments, a despicable bit of reasoning and a monumental political gift. An excerpt:

Akin’s track record made him my ideal opponent. Many of his votes in Congress contradicted his claim of being a fiscal conservative. While he opposed President Barack Obama’s authority to raise the debt limit, during the Bush administration, in 2004, he had voted to raise the limit by $800 billion. A vocal opponent of the Obama administration’s stimulus efforts, in 2001 Akin had voted in favor of a $25 billion stimulus package that mostly benefited large corporations and the wealthy. And he was a big earmarker: in one fiscal year he sponsored or cosponsored $14 million worth of pork and once sought $3.3 million in a special appropriation for a highway near nine acres he owned and was planning to develop. While opposing spending money for child nutrition programs, veterans’ health benefits, and disaster relief, he repeatedly voted to raise his own salary.

His extreme positions on social issues and ridiculous public statements made him anathema to many independent voters. He sponsored an amendment that would define life as beginning at conception, thereby outlawing common forms of birth control. He voted against repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation. When the Affordable Care Act was being debated, he stood on the House floor and asked for God’s help in keeping the nation from “socialized medicine.” In 2008, he claimed in a House floor speech that it was “common practice” for doctors to conduct abortions on women “who were not actually pregnant.” He had made speeches calling for America to pull out of the United Nations and claiming the government had “a bunch of socialists in the Senate” and a “commie” in the White House.

So how could we maneuver Akin into the GOP driver’s seat?•