Rather, the point is that Democrats rarely get asked similar questions from the mainstream media. The rape-and-incest abortion questions are totally fair game. But why was no Democrat asked an equivalent abortion question in Tuesday’s debate. Why not ask something like: “Mrs. Clinton, you recently told John Dickerson of CBS that you oppose any restrictions on abortion, at any stage of pregnancy. Do you honestly believe that it should be legal to abort a healthy 8-month-old fetus for non-medical reasons? Also, would you be okay with Planned Parenthood then selling that healthy fetus’s brain and heart?”

Sure, it’s a nasty question, but no less unfair or irrelevant than the ones routinely put to Republican candidates. It’s just as easy to concoct a host of questions about religion, immigration, and gay rights that would illuminate that Democrats, too, can be out of the mainstream.

Anderson Cooper and his colleagues at CNN didn’t only lob softballs at the Democrats in Las Vegas; they made little to no effort to highlight the fact that on many social issues, the Democratic party is often more out of the mainstream than the Republicans are. Why? Because the Democrats don’t seem out of the mainstream — to the mainstream media.