After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry
used the word "plan" 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a
plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there
is no parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out days later that the
Kerry campaign has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis.
What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.
This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa:
"If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we
will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve
are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more
loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad.
Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the
catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
First, the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate
is one of the great mysteries of biology. The answer is not remotely
around the corner. It could take a generation to unravel. To imply, as
Edwards did, that it is imminent if only you elect the right
politicians is scandalous.
Second, if the cure for spinal cord injury comes, we have no
idea where it will come from. There are many lines of inquiry. Stem
cell research is just one of many possibilities, and a very
speculative one at that. For 30 years I have heard promises of miracle
cures for paralysis (including my own, suffered as a medical student).
The last fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought to be a sure
thing. Nothing came of it.
As a doctor by training, I've known better than to believe
the hype -- and have tried in my own counseling of people with new
spinal cord injuries to place the possibility of cure in abeyance. I
advise instead to concentrate on making a life (and a very good life
it can be) with the hand one is dealt. The greatest enemies of this
advice have been the snake-oil salesmen promising a miracle around the
corner. I never expected a candidate for vice president to be one of
them.
Third, the implication that Christopher Reeve was prevented
from getting out of his wheelchair by the Bush stem cell policies is a
travesty.
George Bush is the first president to approve federal funding
for stem cell research. There are 22 lines of stem cells now
available, up from one just two years ago. As Leon Kass, head of the
President's Council on Bioethics, has written, there are 3,500
shipments of stem cells waiting for anybody who wants them.
Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush "ban" on stem
cell research. This is false. There is no ban. You want to study stem
cells? You get them from the companies that have the cells and apply
to the National Institutes of Health for the federal funding.
In his Aug. 7 radio address to the nation, Kerry referred not
once but four times to the "ban" on stem cell research instituted by
Bush. At the time, Reeve was alive, so not available for posthumous
exploitation. But Ronald Reagan was available, having recently died of
Alzheimer's.
So what does Kerry do? He begins his radio address with the
disgraceful claim that the stem cell "ban" is standing in the way of
an Alzheimer's cure.
This is an outright lie. The President's Council on
Bioethics, on which I sit, had one of the world's foremost experts on
Alzheimer's, Dennis Selkoe from Harvard, give us a lecture on the
newest and most promising approaches to solving the Alzheimer's
mystery. Selkoe reported remarkable progress in using biochemicals to
clear the "plaque" deposits in the brain that lead to Alzheimer's. He
ended his presentation without the phrase "stem cells" having passed
his lips.
So much for the miracle cure. Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell
researcher at NIH, has admitted publicly that stem cells as an
Alzheimer's cure are a fiction, but that "people need a fairy tale."
Kerry and Edwards certainly do. They are shamelessly exploiting this
fairy tale, having no doubt been told by their pollsters that stem
cells play well politically for them.
Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is
part of the game. It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here,
dairy price controls there. But to exploit the desperate hopes of
desperate people with the promise of Christ-like cures is beyond the
pale.
There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too
revealing. There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get
elected.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
