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AIDS and the Presidential Campaign
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13128 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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11 / 1987 |
2,826 Words |
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Donald Lambro
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If the nation's top political strategists had been asked in 1984 to predict the major issues of the next presidential campaign, no one would have named what is swiftly becoming one of the most emotionally charged issues of the 1988 presidential sweepstakes: AIDS.
"I think it is certainly the biggest health issue we've seen since polio," says former Gov. Pete Du Pont of Delaware, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
"It is time to break the public policy logjam," says New York Rep. Jack Kemp, another GOP contender. "While we must avoid alarmism, we must also avoid complacency. The facts about AIDS are serious enough to demand a far more serious response than we have seen so far."
Former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt, who is seeking the Democratic nod, calls AIDS "the most virulent and lethal contagion we've faced since the flu epidemic after the First World War." He accuses "this administration and its soulmates in the conservative movement" of having "given us a policy that is a disgrace. It's a concoction of irrationality and prejudice that we should have left behind long ago."
AIDS, a contagious and incurable disease, has killed more than 22,000 people since it was identified six years ago. The Public Health Service estimates that 1 million to 1.5 million Americans are now infected with the AIDS virus, which impairs the immune system and leaves carriers susceptible to certain fatal illnesses. By 1991, medical experts say, the death toll will be about 54,000.
This is why there is a growing consensus across America's broad political spectrum that AIDS issues are becoming too politically compelling for presidential hopefuls to ignore.
Rising public concern
National public opinion polls show that the percentage of people believing that AIDS is America's foremost national health problem almost doubled between September 1986 and March 1987. When asked by an ABC/Washington Post poll last March what they believed was the greatest health problem facing the nation, 64 percent of the respondents said AIDS. Six months before that, only 33 percent said AIDS.
Health policy experts and political strategists all agree that this rising public concern about the disease will determine the importance and viability of whatever AIDS policies are to be proposed in next year's presidential contests.
"I think it's fair to say that this has the potential to be a big issue, but it depends upon the issue maintaining a high level of concern among the public," said Edmund Haislmaier, a health policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank. "It's the unknown about AIDS that is causing the public to be concerned, but it is that same unknown that causes problems for politicians. Politicians don't know exactly what to do about it.
"No mainstream presidential candidate can be irresponsible enough not to address this issue," Democratic campaign consultant Earl Bender said. "It is the one that captures the most
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