WASHINGTON -- In a campaign that played out like a red state/blue state version of the Hatfields and the McCoys, the issue of embryonic stem-cell research was one of many nails poured into the blue-state blunderbuss and fired across the Mason-Dixon line.
It may have been the only one that hit its target. The biggest McCoy of all, California, voted to authorize spending up to $3 billion over 10 years on stem-cell research -- a plan intended as a direct assault on President Bush's strict limits on embryonic stem-cell research and, by extension, on the politics of religious values that underlay the Bush campaign.
Political movements, like the best surfer waves, tend to flow from West to East. With little to comfort them since Bush's victory last week, Democrats can only hope the stem-cell revolt will follow the same path as the tax revolts of the late '70s and the immigration revolts of the early '90s.
The California stem-cell referendum was extraordinary in many respects. It put a state government in the business of medical research, taking on a job that normally falls to the federal government and private sector. And while many state referendums seem more symbolic than real -- a chance for citizens to cast a meaningless protest vote -- this one delivered big money. The $3 billion is, by some measures, more than John F. Kerry promised in his plan to ramp up stem-cell research.
