Editor's note. I just learned that opponents of Missouri's Amendment Two will air their own ad tonight during Game Four of the World Series. (St. Louis is squaring off against Detroit.) Cardinals pitcher Jeff Suppan, Kansas City Royals baseball star Mike Sweeney, former Rams quarterback Kurt Warner, "Everybody Loves Raymond" co-star Patricia Heaton, and Jim Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus in "The Passion of the Christ," will appear in the ad. Actor Michael J. Fox was featured in an ad that ran during Game One in favor of the Amendment.

"[Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director for the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center] notes that the issue of stem cell research has the potential to be an advantage to Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections since polls have shown the majority of Americans favor some form of stem cell research. The risk, she adds, is that the ads could appear as using Fox's hopes for a cure for political gain, as some claimed was the case when the paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve lobbied for stem cell research before his death in 2004."
     Associated Press, October 24.

While Jamieson's statement to AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle leaves out as much as it includes, her observations nonetheless help us make sense of the growing controversy over actor Michael J. Fox's heavy involvement in political races this election cycle.

For those few who might not know, Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, has cut political commercials for Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, who is running for the Senate in Maryland, Senate candidate Claire McCaskill in Missouri, and Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle. The ad that has received the most attention is for McCaskill, who is running against pro-life incumbent Sen. Jim Talent.

Let me clear, being an actor doesn't disqualify Fox from commenting. Anyone, regardless of his or her profession, has the right to speak out. But there is a moral, if not legal obligation, to tell the truth. Or approximate the truth. Or at least come within several hundred miles of the truth.

The backdrop to the ad is that pro-cloning forces in Missouri are sinking tens of millions of dollars into passage of "Amendment Two." This means, according to opponents, "On November 7, Missouri voters will decide if the State of Missouri will give constitutional protection to the cloning of human beings for research purposes while providing the biotech industry the unchecked authority and tax-payer funding to conduct these unproven and unethical experiments."

McCaskill supports Amendment Two. Talent opposes it.

Fox delivers a 30-second spiel that is as emotionally powerful as it is untrue. In the spot Fox is shaking almost uncontrollably, lending his words even more power.

It is worth noting that Fox is not above manipulating his audience. As he wrote on page 247 of his book, "Lucky Man," when Fox made his appearance before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on September 28, 1999, "I had made a deliberate choice to appear before the subcommittee without medication. It seemed to me that this occasion demanded that my testimony about the effects of the disease, and the urgency we as a community were feeling, be seen as well as heard. For people who had never observed me in this kind of shape, the transformation must have been startling."

He confirmed this in a subsequent interview with Diane Sawyer.

But having Parkinson's does not automatically make what he says true, nor does it relieve us of the obligation to point out falsehoods.

In the Missouri ad, Fox insists that Talent "even wanted to criminalize the science that gives us a chance for hope." Let's carefully deconstruct this statement.

#1. What is Talent for? He supports stem cell research using adult stem cells and stem cells from cord blood.

What does he oppose? Talent opposes lethally harvesting stem cells from human embryos. To date all the promising results in curing or remedying a myriad of diseases have come from sources other than human embryos.

Ironically, by supporting candidates who would shovel money into a less promising direction (human embryos), Fox is shortchanging "the science that gives us a chance for hope."

The latest research backs that up. As bioethicist Wesley Smith wrote on his blog this week, "In recent days, American researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center and Harvard have also come forward with studies confirming the adverse effects of embryonic cells growing uncontrollably and becoming tumors. One can hardly consider that 'promising.'"

#2. To repeat, Fox wishes to insinuate that Talent opposes all stem cell research. Talent supports research using adult stem cell sources and stem cells from cord blood.

Talent does oppose human cloning. And multiple public opinion polls have demonstrated that the public favors a ban on human cloning-- including cloning of human embryos for so-called "therapeutic" purposes -- by overwhelming margins.

Fox's commercials are hardly the only ones to attempt to manipulate people's emotions and bypass the truth. Everyone knew that once John Kerry and his crew politicized what had been a tradition of non-partisan attempts to treat diseases, the gloves would come off in 2006. (In a sort of dry-run, Kerry's running mate, John Edward, declared, "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.")

Two quick examples.

First, a highly effective ad ran featuring a host of people, including a young girl, who insist that only dastardly politicians stand in the way of cures for a host of diseases. The problem is that the "source" of these alleged cures is embryonic stem cells--which, as noted above, have no track record of success.

Smith describes part of the ad this way: "The ad represents everything people hate about politics. …[I]t is dishonest. It has a woman claiming she will get Alzheimer's in twenty years, strongly implying that ES cells could cure her. But, it is well known that ESCR [Embryonic Stem Cell Research] is highly unlikely to provide a cure for Alzheimer's disease. One notable researcher even stated that 'people need a fairy tale' as the reason the biotech sector is generally permitting people to believe this falsehood about ESCR--sheer mendacity promoted blatantly in this ad."

Second, and even worse, read this from a newspaper in Waterloo, Iowa.

"Republican Iowa House District 20 candidate David Wieland and Iowa House Speaker Christopher Rants of Sioux City have denounced a political advertisement released this weekend against Wieland showing what appears to be a covered cadaver on a gurney, assailing his position on stem-cell research. Wieland said he supports adult, but not embryonic, stem-cell research, but said the ad implies 'If you vote for Dave Wieland, you're going to kill people.'"

There appears to be no level to which proponents of human cloning and research using human embryos won't sink.

If you have any questions or comments, please write Dave Andrusko at daveandrusko@hotmail.com