I’m a bit late on this, but there was a good debate last week on Democracy Now between NOW president Kim Gandy and Communications Director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Phil Singer. You can guess what it was about.

As an update to previous coverage on talk of Democrats considering putting reproductive rights on the side (or I should say entirely out of the agenda) in order to obtain more conservative votes, we find that Pennsylvania and Rhode Island are showing signs of the Democratic Party’s support of this “big tent” approach.

Pennsylvania Democratic State Treasurer Bob Casey Jr. has recently announced his decision to run in the 2006 U.S. Senate race. Casey happens to be an abortion rights opponent, and has also happened to have been courted to run by senior member of the democratic party for the previous weeks before his announcement. Former State Treasurer and pro-choice supporter Barbara Hafer had made it clear she intended to run, but the governor asked her to step down so Casey could take the reigns. In the meantime, Rhode Island Secretary of State and pro-choicer Matt Brown has been planning to run in the race, but now the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is urging anti-choicer Rep. Jim Langevin to run. Gandy and Singer take on these recent cases in their debate.

While Singer tries to assure Gandy that this is merely a strategy that will put more Dems in Senate seats and actually help women’s reproductive rights, Gandy doesn’t buy it:

“One of the primary issues that energized the Democratic base was the issue of Roe v. Wade, the issue of the Supreme Court. It's what brought millions and millions of people to the polls. One point one five million of them came to Washington, D.C. last April to march for women's rights, and women's lives and reproductive freedom. That energized the Democratic base all over the country; and now the leadership of the party is slapping all of those people in the face and saying, ‘You know what? We don't really care about your rights. We're willing to throw your rights overboard so that’ – so that for what reason?”

Check out the full transcript, audio or video of the interview here.