She won’t, of course. Her chances at winning the nomination would be spontaneously aborted if she did. But note her demographic profile: This is a midwestern, kinda centrist-y, kinda wonkish senator from a blue state who’s won three statewide elections by 20 points or more. If anyone in the Democratic Party might feel safe expressing a whiff of moderation on infanticide, Klobuchar should be it. “I strongly support the right to choose in the first trimester and with some minor reservations in the second,” she might say, “but I think there’s room for regulation in the third.” That would put her very much in the mainstream of American opinion.

But it would place her on the right-wing fringe of the Democratic Party. Her national ambitions would end instantly.

I mean, really:

What angers me about the GOP’s attempts to turn the United States into a far-right Christian theocracy is how dishonest they are about it.

At least be forthright about your desire to subvert and dismantle our democracy into a creepy theological order led by a mad king.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 17, 2019

Not that Klobuchar’s answer would have changed had McCain asked her this two weeks ago, but there was no way she was getting within a hundred miles of legitimizing abortion regulations so soon after Alabama’s pro-life bill sent pro-choicers into a frenzy. The left is on offense on this issue. If Klobuchar had retreated by trying to find common ground with McCain, they would have dismissed her as someone who, whatever the intellectual merits of her position, clearly is unwilling to “fight.” Not an inch must be given in the eternal struggle for the right to kill your baby at eight months.

The worst part here is Behar racing in to rescue Klobuchar, which is exactly what you want on a national talk show with a presidential candidate being asked a hard question: One of the panelists bailing her out by essentially wresting the microphone from her. Behar’s retort to McCain is that late-term abortion is rare, so rare that we needn’t even bother discussing it! And it is rare — as a percentage of total abortions. Per the CDC’s best estimates, it’s about 1.3 percent of all terminations. But in a country where 800,000 children are aborted every year, even a tiny percentage amounts to a large raw number, in excess of 10,000 annually. By no means are all of those women aborting for medical reasons either. According to a 2013 study of late-term abortion, most fit one of five profiles: “They were raising children alone, were depressed or using illicit substances, were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence, had trouble deciding and then had access problems, or were young and nulliparous.”

If, per Behar, this is allegedly such an insignificant sliver of abortions, why are pro-choicers so adamant about fighting for its continued legality?

McCain even handed Klobuchar an easy dodge by specifically asking her about Ralph Northam’s infamous comments. She could have said that she supports the right to choose but that she thought Northam was referring specifically to terminally ill children and that he did a horrendous job of describing the procedure. But even that probably would have been “too pro-life” for Democrats.

Exit question: Does AOC think all pro-lifers are Christian? I can assure her personally that they aren’t.