Level the playing field

It’s fourth quarter, fourth and goal…no, fourth and 10…to go, you’re down by a touchdown and there’s a minute on the clock…maybe less. What do you do now?

If the other team has succeeded the whole game by playing dirty, you get down there, too. And you connect. So says Michael Cook in a provocative piece on the stem cell battle in Mercatornet.

Everyone expects political commercials to oversimplify things, but American commercials dealing with stem cell research make mere oversimplification look like a PhD dissertation. Scepticism that therapeutic cloning might not deliver the goods is interpreted as despicable Pharisaism.

In the weeks before the November 7 elections, the worst example of dumbed-down argument uses three actors. There’s a teenaged boy who says he might get paralysed in a car accident, a young woman who worries about getting Alzheimer’s, and a little girl who pouts that she might get diabetes. “Maybe I’m your mother. Maybe I’m your grandson. Maybe I’m your little girl… How come he think he gets to decide who lives and who dies? Who is he?” It’s cloyingly, shamefully, deceitfully emotional, uncontaminated by a smidgen of fact, the medical counterpart of the notorious Willie Horton commercials which sank Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election. But it works.

That’s why Michael J. Fox is everywhere. And the weekend news reports even through Saturday afternoon are talking about that, and how “Democrats stand to gain from his exposure.” Why? Because the message he conveys is that Republicans are against “stem cell research” (though he strategically avoids mentioning specifically embryonic stem cells, since those same candidates do support adult and cord blood stem cell research). The visceral reaction you’re supposed to have is that anyone against “stem cells” is against Michael J. Fox being cured.

And, as Cook says, it works.

It works so well, in fact, that it is being used in not one, but four states. A Democratic lobby group, Majority Action, is using it to “turn a powerful spotlight” on four members of the House of Representatives: Jim Walsh, of New York; Chris Chocola, of Indiana; Doug Sherwood, of Pennsylvania; and Thelma Drake, of Virginia. Majority Action spokesman Mark Longabaugh, says that “stem cell research offers great medical hope for patients and families suffering from devastating illness or injuries. This ad, in very powerful terms, lays out what is at stake in the stem cell debate… Republicans have made choices that pick ideology over life-saving medical research.”

The only problem is that this medical research hasn’t actually saved any lives and may never save any. In fact, the smart money is on adult stem cells. As Associate Professor James Sherley, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote last week: “Despite similar misinformation to the contrary, adult stem cell research is a viable and vibrant path to new medical therapies. Even calling them an alternative to embryonic stem cells misinforms the public. Why? Because embryonic stem cells provide no path at all. ” Even scientists who are ardent supporters of the research have acknowledged that useful products from embryonic stem cells are at least 15 years away. And no one has ventured to guess how much these cures might cost.

Distorted as they may be, something can be learned from ads like these.

It’s late in the game, but let’s think about that. Cook makes an uncomfortable case here for anyone playing fair, talking truth about life and making strong arguments out of the scientific facts. He says the public just doesn’t hear it and it’s cumbersome and scientific and not punchy enough in a soundbite culture.

So how can those who believe that destroying embryos for medical research frame their argument when they have only seconds to present it in an advertisement? The safest avenue seems to be the one taken by the lobby group Missourians Against Human Cloning: pinch the hip-pocket nerve and repeat the word “cloning” as many times as possible. It wants to sink an amendment to the state constitution which would bulletproof therapeutic cloning from legislative interference. Instead of defending embryo rights, its ad focuses on “biotech special interests who stand to gain millions of dollars”. The talking head approach has little of the emotional punch of the pro-research ads, but it does appeal to taxpayers’ horror of pouring their hard-earned money down the gullet of fatcat business interests.

But, ultimately, to persuade a public which has been told for decades that contraception and abortion are fundamental human rights, more creativity, more thinking outside the square, is needed. People simply are not used to thinking deeply about life. There’s little point in moaning about hitting below the belt. If television appeals to the emotions, be emotional. But don’t try to write a Stephen King novel about embryo research — it won’t work.

Clock’s ticking. Game almost over. And did I mention it’s the Super Bowl? It is in Missouri.