Grim Reaper Politics

Richard Nixon understood a fundamental truth of governing: No political promise tops a pledge to defeat death. In his 1971 State of the Union Address -- a speech that ironically may well have been the high-water mark of big-government liberalism -- Nixon put the federal government at the forefront of a new war on cancer. In rhetoric that led to the creation of the National Cancer Institute, Nixon declared, "The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease."(Okay, the metaphors were hackneyed even then, but the political impulse was brilliant, coming as it did in the midst of a different kind of war in Vietnam)

This half-forgotten Nixon moment came to mind when the Republican House voted Tuesday to overturn George W. Bush's ban on government funding of most stem-cell research. By threatening the first veto of his presidency (that's correct, no president in history has been nearly so docile in confronting congressional excess), Bush has demonstrated that he is so unyielding in his pro-life commitment that he comes across as good buddies with the Grim Reaper. As Jo Ann Emerson, an anti-abortion Missouri Republican who was among the 50 GOP House members to bolt the party line on the stem-cell vote, put it, "Who can say that prolonging a life is not pro-life?" (The Emerson quote comes at the end of this Washington Post story).

The most telling illustration of the political weakness of the Bush stem-cell position was the desperate P-R move to immediately surround the president with 21 squalling babies and restive small children in the East Room of the White House. Bush proudly announced, "The families here today have either adopted or given up for adoption frozen embryos that remained after fertility treatments."

As warm and cuddly as these adoption stories may be, nobody is claiming that the countless embryos in the freezers of fertility clinics will somehow all produce new Tanners and Noelles to gambol at a White House photo-op in some future conservative administration. The stem-cell issue does not present a zero-sum choice between childbirth and research. Unless Bush wants to demand that all residents of China and Korea start adopting American embryos, there inevitably will be a huge mismatch between the number of available frozen cells and would-be parents.

With more than 18 months to go in the congressional session, it will be near-impossible for Bill Frist to block Senate passage of stem-cell legislation until the 2006 election. Congressional approval will confront Bush with one of the most far-reaching political decisions of his second term. Does he wield the veto pen? Presumably, Bush would stand firm on what Tuesday he called "the grave moral issues at stake." That stance is perhaps comforting if you are a frozen embryo, but it offers fewer tangible benefits to those who happen to be living. And as Richard Nixon might point out from the Other Side, the living tend to be the most active voters, even after factoring in the political traditions of Chicago.

The House vote illustrated the growing fissures in the Republican coalition between anti-tax libertarians and religiously motivated conservatives. Now that the Bush tax cuts are virtually permanent, free-market zealots may begin to wonder what they continue to gain from their oddball alliance with politicized evangelicals. Certainly not much when it comes to stem cells, which is why powerful economic conservatives like Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier joined the GOP mavericks in Tuesday's vote. As for Bush himself, his legacy may be to have presided over the transformation of the GOP from the party of the War on Cancer to the party of the War on Medical Research.