When Is a Wedge Not a Wedge

I subscribe to TNR just to disagree with it, but Noam Scheiber has a piece online today on political effects of the stem-cell debate, and I am still pondering his premise.

It starts with good news for me. The subhead reads STEM-CELL RESEARCH ISN'T A WEDGE ISSUE. And I am quite concerned that the Democrats have found a good one. The thesis of Scheiber's article is that a successful wedge issue plays into its own sub-text.

For example, how is it that Bush used the Iraq war to his advantage in 2004 even though more than half the country had serious reservations about it? The answer is that the debate wasn't about the Iraq war per se. It was about Bush's toughness and resolve on the one hand, and Kerry's weakness and indecisiveness on the other. By running on the war's metaphorical meaning rather than the war itself, Bush managed to unite his own side and split Democrats--a textbook wedge maneuver.

Alas, Democrats could be waiting a long time if they think stem cells are going to do for them what gay marriage has done for Republicans. It's not that voters disagree with the Democratic position. Polls consistently show anywhere from 55 to 75 percent of the public favors research using stem cells from discarded embryos. Were referendums on the issue to come before voters in all 50 states, the vast majority would pass, most by large margins.

Remember, we're reading TNR here. Yes, I assert that the GOP was demonstrably tougher. But he questions whether the ESC debate divides the same way.

The flaw is to assume that the Republicans who disagree with Bush on the stem-cell issue represent a potentially large source of Democratic gains. Mellman, among others, flirts with this fallacy when he notes that "stem-cell research emerged as an important 'sleeper' issue in the last campaign." He's right about one thing: All the attacks on Bush's opposition to stem-cell research--who could forget Ron Reagan's speech at the Democratic convention?--probably did persuade voters that Bush's position was wrong. Unfortunately, many of these voters ended up supporting Bush anyway. According to a poll released by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation not long after the 2004 election, roughly half of all Bush voters favor "research using stem cells obtained from human embryos" that would otherwise have been discarded. It turns out most voters don't punish politicians who disagree with them on the stem-cell issue.

So far, so good. This time I'd like to agree with TNR, but the debate might well split the libertarian-Republicans from the evangelical. I would think that any way the Democrats can exploit that will be to their advantage (consider Ryan Segar's Atlantic story -- this could help them in the West).

What concerns me the most is the reason Scheiber gives for this issue not working. He claims a strong undercurrent of concern with bioethics.

On one side of this debate are those who believe biotechnology is mostly a force for good, and that reining it in is basically reactionary. On the other side are those more troubled by the moral and ethical questions raised by advances in biotechnology. The problem for Democrats is that the American public splits a lot more evenly on these questions than it does on the narrower question of whether to extract stem cells from discarded embryos.

The easiest way to see this is to consult an annual survey by the Life Sciences center at Virginia Commonwealth University, arguably the most authoritative source on public attitudes toward science. What the VCU survey reveals is deep ambivalence. According to the most recent installment, Americans believe by a 56-37 margin that scientific research "doesn't pay enough attention to the moral values of society," and by a 52-41 margin that this research has "created as many problems for society as it has solutions."

No, Silence, not all the forces of anti-modernity are on the left. These numbers concern me more deeply than a good issue for the other side. Beyond ESC research, I have a hard time naming items that are ethically questionable. Cloning and designer genes seem outside the mainstream enough to be ignored. A majority think that science needs more control? I hope he is right about the effect but wrong about the reasons. Now, who's cherry-picking?

Politics Posted by jk at July 25, 2006 3:57 PM