Rachel Maddow asks why Democrats aren’t making GOP extremism a national issue

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has been researching the positions on abortion held by current Republican candidates and believes that, overall, they are far more extreme than in any previous election year. She also wonders why the Democratic Party hasn’t made an issue of this extremism.

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“The Republican Party is, without actually talking about it, this year nominating a group of candidates for top-of-the-ticket races that are more extreme on the issue of abortion than any other slate of top-of-the-ticket candidates in any other year,” Maddow stated on Thursday.

She pointed to several GOP Senatorial candidates or front-runners who have declared that they oppose a right to abortion even in cases of rape or incest, including Nevada’s Sharron Angle, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, and Colorado’s Ken Buck.

According to Maddow, these three “small government conservatives” all believe “that government should be big enough that it can monitor every pregnancy in the country to ensure that every single woman who becomes pregnant is forced by the government to carry that pregnancy to term. … This is a position that was beyond the pale even in fringe anti-abortion politics not very many years ago, but apparently those days are over.”

“They’re not trying to run on this as a national issue,” Maddow said of the Republicans. “I can understand why. But maybe Democrats should be making this a national issue.”

She then turned to political scientist Melissa Harris-Lacewell, asking, “How did even anti-abortion politics in mainstream electoral politics get so fringe-y?”

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“We’re in a period of deep economic anxiety,” Harris-Lacewell replied, suggesting that people are trying to assert control over their own lives by controlling women’s reproduction.

She also pointed to racially-based fear of illegal immigrants, which leads some people to fear that “on one hand … there’s a population that is over-reproducing. … On the other hand, there’s an anxiety about wanting, particularly, middle-class white women to produce more babies … to counteract all of these bad anchor babies.”

“Why do you think the Democrats have been gun-shy, so far, about making an issue of this?” Maddow asked.

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Harris-Lacewell suggested that it’s difficult “to have the conversation [with those who believe abortion is murder] because there’s not a lot of common ground.”

She concluded, however, that “Democrats just haven’t done a very good job about redefining ethical questions and normative questions from a progressive agenda perspective. So they continue to kind of cede this ground to conservatives.”

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This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Aug. 5, 2010.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Aug. 5, 2010.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy