Why do I get this nagging knot in my gut that President Obama’s so-called “moonshot” effort to find a cure for cancer isn’t getting enough attention on an important aspect of it?
It will have to continue long past the day that Barack Obama leaves the White House for the final time as president.
He turned to Vice President Biden during his State of the Union speech and made Biden the leader of the effort to find a cure for cancer. The president now wants to commit $1 billion toward that goal.
But the 44th president has less than a year to go. There won’t be a cure found before he leaves office. Who’s going to keep fighting that fight? Who’s going to lead the effort?
Would it be Biden, who leaves office the same day as Barack Obama? It ought to be.
We all know someone who’s been affected by this killer. Many of us have endured treatment and therapy ourselves.
There’s certain to be opposition to the president’s call for such a major expenditure. My hope is that we can muster the kind of national will that we managed to find for the actual moonshot initiative launched by President Kennedy in 1961.
According to The Hill: “In any type of major ambitious efforts, unless you set your sights high, you’re almost guaranteed to not get to the type of success that we all want,” an administration official said. “There’s a reason the vice president is aspiring big, it’s the only way we’re going to push the envelope and make this kind of progress.”
True enough. This project, though, is going to require a lot of attention that must persist long after the current administration leaves office.
Whoever succeeds Barack Obama has to commit with the same fervor to the fight to cure cancer.
One demonstration of that commitment would be to keep Joe Biden on the job.
