Stem Cell Veto Good for Democrats?

By Jason Bane      July 14, 2006 1:58 PM

President Bush has said that he will veto Rep. Diana DeGette's stem cell funding bill - a move that may put Democrats in a good political position come November. Tom Curry of MSNBC has an interesting take on this:
Sen. Charles Schumer, D- N.Y., the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Tuesday that surveys show significant voter movement to the Democrats due to the stem cell issue. Many scientists say that use of cells derived from embryos offers hope of finding treatments for Parkinson's disease and other ailments. "Protestant non-evangelical Republicans" are shifting, Schumer told reporters. "The elder in the Presbyterian church in the suburbs of Cincinnati," Schumer said with precise specificity, naming his electoral target. "There's a feeling among more affluent Republicans of uncomfortable-ness with where the Republican Party is headed." Such voters, Schumer said, "don't like Schiavo," a reference to congressional intervention last year in the case of the disabled Florida woman Terri Schiavo. "And they don't like creationism being taught in the public schools, and they sure don't like blocking stem cell research. It's an issue that affects lots of swing voter Republicans who will move to the Democratic sideâ€¦. When they know somebody who says, â€˜My daughter could be blind by age 20, please allow stem cell research,' they don't see why not."

The Dems are especially crafty in not distinguishing embryonic and adult-derived stem cells. The first actually involves so-called therapeutic cloning of the patient, since otherwise the patient will reject stem cell DNA. However, their "the lame shall walk! The Blind shall see!" rhetoric will really backfire if immediate results aren't forthcoming. People might even see through its false promises, recognizing that adult stem cell research has made actual progress. Fetal tissue was the big panacea back in the late nineties, but that dropped off of the presses once trial human experiments ended with ugly teratomas growing in patients. Lurking behind all this, of course, is the abortion issue: if medical experiments prove successful, abortion and embryo-destruction will become that much more acceptable to the American people, who are utilitarian to a fault. They're lucky Bush is so inarticulate, and the press so scientifically illiterate.
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