We Must Proceed With Great Care

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Since Bush did not block funding altogether, as the most hard-line conservatives hoped, but did sharply limit it, he got credit for moving toward the middle without moving much at all. The loudest objections came from scientists, whose natural interest is in the greatest possible funding to do the freest possible research. But Bush's timing was shrewd, coming just two days after three scientists appeared before the National Academy of Sciences to discuss the progress of their offshore baby-cloning lab.

As for the thicket of moral arguments, Bush ducked and weaved through the logic of his decision. At times he came close to the kind of cost-benefit analysis they taught him at Harvard Business School but which true believers deplore. He would allow research on existing stem-cell lines, "where the life-and-death decision has already been made." But does it really keep the government's hands clean--to benefit from the destruction of embryos so long as other people do the destroying? The problem with crafting public policy in this way, argues Hastings Center bioethicist Erik Parens, "beyond simply the internal inconsistencies, is that it allows us to get around asking the really hard questions: What is the proper scope of embryo research? Simply massaging the language and pretending we aren't really doing embryo research opens a nifty loophole but fails to answer some of the questions that this research is sure to generate."

Whatever its moral lumpiness, there was political beauty in Bush's narrow escape from an issue that seemed sure to leave him bruised by one constituency or another. But on this issue his party is split--even pro-lifers are split--so although some on his right flank are disappointed and wary, Bush is not at risk from them, at least for now.

If Bush's goal was to sand the hard edges off his presidency, recover some standing with soccer moms after spooking them with arsenic and oil wells and ozone levels, then how he decided mattered almost as much as what he decided. In fact, that was the subtext of the whole speech. He laid out his own internal debate, lingered respectfully over arguments on both sides, showed how he had tried to wrestle the contradictions to the ground. He seemed earnest and engaged on a brutally hard issue--this from the man who for much of the year has seemed auto-piloted, anti-intellectual, far too playful and a few shifts short of hardworking. On top of everything else, Bush needed to reassure the vast middle ground of Americans that he could be trusted with the job they didn't really give him in the first place. "I have made this decision with great care," he said, "and I pray it is the right one."

And this is where the science actually helped him. The harder the issue, the more acceptable he would seem if he could just stay afloat and move through the murky waters. It takes less than the 11 minutes Bush spoke to see that this is a hard call, one we can't leave to either the scientists or the priests. It's why we have Presidents; more directly, it's why we need a wise one. On Thursday night, Bush almost seemed as if he was auditioning for the job he won last December.

--With reporting by Andrew Goldstein/New York