Hard to watch. Powerful.

I guess if you can spend this much money on a campaign with stem cells at the center, you can get an ad like this together. But this ad may well foreshadow the next presidential election. Joshua Marshall noted in his Talking Points Memo that the thing is still too close to call (well that wasn't his metaphor, but I didn't like his metaphor. But the ad is precisely what will turn the tides against the Rove move to turn social issues into a "get out the church vote" in key swing states. Maybe.

At a minimum it returns the tone of the debate to the Star Versus Star model, where you'll recall (well, I do anyway, because I had to debate him) that Mel Gibson was the best that the "other side" could do - and he's begun to demonstrate that his hard line position may be a symptom of near-psychosis perhaps a less effective "star representative." There are always the Snow Children, I guess.

What is so troubling about these commercials, as with the Reeve commercials, is that they plainly foment therapeutic misconception: people in Missouri should not have to believe that Mr. Fox would be cured if only the President had funded stem cell research, or that Missouri could somehow do much much more than its current, formidable stem cell research were there a little bolus of cash in that state for the science. It's not as bad as right wing ads that flat out lie about adult stem cell "therapies," or signing ceremonies with a few of the miniscule number of embryos ever to be adopted - none of whom were destined for stem cell research anyway. The ad is above