Missouri Senator's Stem Cell Switch Imperils Re-Election

Robert Novak, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, says that Sen. Jim Talent's flip-flop on the human cloning ban could cost him his Senate seat:

Defection from the anti-cloning ranks by Sen. Jim Talent, until now a rising star in the conservative movement, reflects deep divisions in the Republican Party created by the stem cell research issue. When Talent went on the Senate floor Friday to take his name off a bill to ban human cloning, he showed how those divisions imperil his re-election to a second term in Missouri this year.

Talent had been a longtime co-sponsor of Sen. Sam Brownback's anti-cloning bill. But Missouri business interests who finance the Republican Party are backing a state constitutional amendment that explicitly allows human cloning to enable scientific experiments on embryonic stem cells. Talent succumbed to pressure to step away from Brownback, basing this on the premise that there are new scientific developments. Talent's risk is that his social conservative constituency will abandon him at the polls.

Missouri has been a passionate battleground, beginning with the Civil War and more recently as a weather vane for national elections. The stem cell struggle there reflects nationwide tension between the country club and religious conservatives that has been kept under control in the largely dormant abortion debate. But Democrats want to use stem cell research as a wedge issue in the way Republicans used gay marriage. Talent had a political choice between the country club and his old right-wing constituency, and he picked the country club.

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My Comments:
I think conservatives in the "Show Me State" need to show Jim Talent the door in November by staying home on election day.