Stem cell issue opens campaign divide

WASHINGTON -- Three years ago tomorrow, President Bush announced he would bar federal funds for research using new embryonic stem cell lines. No more potential life would be destroyed for science, Bush declared, thereby drawing a line between moral belief and science that is emerging as a crucial front in his reelection campaign.

''I worry about a culture that devalues life and believe, as your president, I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world," Bush said Aug. 9, 2001, calling life ''a sacred gift from our creator."

Now, the politics of embryonic stem cell research, buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center attack four weeks after Bush's announcement, is back.

Yesterday, Senator John F. Kerry took over the Democrats' weekly radio address to offer an extensive attack on limiting science, evidence that the Democrats are moving to make stem cell research a powerful wedge issue. Some campaign analysts depict it as the Democrats' equivalent of values issues, such as school prayer or ''partial-birth" abortion, that Republicans have used to attract votes past elections.

The issue has grown from an occasional line in Kerry's stump speech last winter to a powerful code phrase, repeated by the candidate almost daily, for Bush's decision to limit, in the name of his beliefs, a field of research that many scientists believe offers hope for treatments for some of mankind's most intractable illnesses.

''Here in America, we don't sacrifice science for ideology," Kerry said yesterday. ''We're going to lift the ban on stem cell research. We're going to listen to our scientists and stand up for science. We're going to say yes to knowledge, yes to discovery, and yes to a new era of hope for all Americans."

To underscore Kerry's message, the campaign was orchestrating a conference call tomorrow for running mate John Edwards and a physician to discuss stem cell research with reporters.

Bush remains committed to his ban on funding research involving new stem cell lines; research using existing cell lines can still win federal funding. He doesn't raise the topic often, and some Republicans urge him to moderate his stance.

Democrats hope to capitalize on the president's firm position, portraying this as a clash of values akin to a Scopes Monkey Trial for the 21st century. In their casting, Bush is like William Jennings Bryan, clinging in religious certitude to creationist theories, while Kerry is like Clarence Darrow defending evolution, a rational defender of scientific promise.

''Bush is caught in a classic conundrum of presidential politics, which is satisfying your base and still playing to the middle," said Democratic strategist Steve Rabinowitz. ''This is as tough as it gets for him. If his base doesn't cut him some slack, he's in trouble over this. . . . He could talk more moderately about it if they roll over, but they're notorious for not rolling over."

The death of former President Ronald Reagan from Alzheimer's disease, a disease many stem cell researchers have targeted, put the issue back in the public eye two months ago. His widow, Nancy, used the occasion of his state funeral to call for lifting restrictions on stem cell research. Other Republicans joined her, arguing that the embryos used in stem cell research could come from fertility clinics that would discard them anyway.

''It does not follow that the theology of a few should be allowed to forestall the health and well-being of the many," the late president's son, Ron Reagan, said at the Democratic National Convention.

In a little-noticed poll conducted in late July for American Demographics magazine, Zogby International found that one of every five people who plans to vote for Bush could change his vote on election day if Kerry proposes a major stem cell research program aimed at curing diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, juvenile diabetes, and spinal injuries.

Kerry would gain 11 percent of Bush's voters, while another 9 percent would switch to a third party, stay home, or at least change their views to undecided. In an op-ed column in the Financial Times, John Zogby suggested that Bush could prevent that from happening and run away with the now-tight election by reversing his policy and lifting the restrictions.

Were the White House to moderate its position, it could do so by citing scientific developments over the last three years. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that of the 78 stem cell lines that Bush declared eligible for funding in 2001, only 21 have turned out to be available for distribution and study. Even these 21 have proved less useful for research than the new cell lines, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundations says in a white paper to be released tomorrow.

It could be awkward for Bush to shift his stance, for reasons that go beyond the moral principle he cited in making it. One of Bush's core campaign themes is that Kerry is a flip-flopper who changes his position with the political winds.

A shift, even a subtle one, could cause Bush major problems with his political base. Wendy Wright, senior policy director at the antiabortion group Concerned Women for America, said her supporters would fight any effort to change the policy and would be disappointed in Bush if he backed down.

She said the left has caricatured the views of stem cell research opponents, saying they are driven by religious beliefs. Instead, she said, their views are founded on a moral objection to using human beings as raw materials for experimentation.

''The problem is, once you break down a moral barrier, it continues to get pushed," she said. ''Right now the proponents say, 'We only want to use embryos up to 14 days, then we'll kill them.' Well, when there's not cures or treatments or only limited success, then they'll say, 'If we could only have two months, let us grow it into a fetus,' and then it will get pushed farther and farther."

Douglas Johnson, the legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, agreed with Wright, suggesting that if the Democrats mount a major offensive on the stem cell issue, Republicans will fight back by making it clear that the GOP favors research using stems cells harvested from adults, instead of embryos, and opposes only research that could lead to human cloning experiments and ''embryo farms."

''We will do what we can to get across these facts that the president is for stem cell research, and we're for it, just not the kind that requires creating and killing human embryos," he said.

In Congress, interest is rising in legislation that would reverse Bush's restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. In April, 206 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, among them 36 Republicans, signed a letter to Bush urging him to revise his order. In June, 58 senators, including 14 Republicans, followed suit.

Observers say it is unlikely that Republican leadership will allow a vote on such a bill during the presidential election, but it could still be attached to a spending bill as an amendment. That prospect prompted the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission to send a letter to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert in July warning of the group's opposition to expanding taxpayer support for ''any experimentation that eradicates the existence of any human, inside or outside the womb."

Jim Mulhall, the former communications strategist for the Democratic National Committee, said that kind of passion among Bush's base has put the president in a bind.

''He can't wish away or talk his way out of a decision he made, and he made with much fanfare, and which his own people organized it in such a way that it emphasized his deliberate, almost solo decision-making," Mulhall said. ''He owns this."

Democrats have wedge issues to fear, too. Keith Appell, a Republican strategist, suggested that Democrats ''shop polls" every election cycle saying some issue is going to be their ''silver bullet . . . to deflect attention from their own vulnerabilities."

This year, he said, the real wedge issue in this cycle will be not stem cell research but same-sex marriage, citing the overwhelming vote last week in favor of a state constitutional amendment banning marriage for gays in Missouri.

''I don't think it [stem cell research] is reemerging at all," Appell said. ''I think it's an effort by Democrats to deflect from social issues they are very vulnerable on, especially the marriage issue and, to a lesser but no less significant extent, the partial birth abortion issue."

For Rabinowitz, the Democratic strategist, stem cells mean Christopher Reeve (''Superman") and spinal cord injuries. ''People feel extremely emotional about this," he said. ''It doesn't have to be your parent or your sibling [who is sick]. Here, Bush used this as an issue early on to placate his base, and now it's coming back to bite him, used as a wedge against him."