Tag: cancer cure

I’ll admit this isn’t an original thought.

Others have said it, so I’m just joining an “amen!” chorus of sorts.

The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that limits the president to two elected terms in office is silent on the vice presidency. The words “vice president” or “vice presidency” aren’t mentioned in the amendment, which was ratified in 1951 after Congress approved it in 1947.

My point? Why not nominate the current vice president, Joseph Biden, to serve another four years in a Clinton administration?

Stop laughing for just a moment and ponder this thought.

President Obama put the vice president in charge of what’s been called a “moon shot” program aimed at finding a cure for cancer. Vice President Biden lost his beloved son, Beau, to brain cancer, a loss that many believe kept him from running for the presidency in 2016.

My thought then, when Obama made the proposal during his final State of the Union speech earlier this year, was this: Is there enough time for Biden to get anything accomplished before he leaves office in January 2017?

I find it hard to imagine how the government could achieve what the president said he wanted — a cancer cure — in such a short span of time.

All this talk about who Clinton should pick as her running mate has provided some interesting chatter across the country, along with the chatter about who Republican nominee Donald J. Trump should select as his running mate.

Clinton has a ready-made, battle-tested, house-broken vice president already on the job. He’s a bona fide foreign-policy expert and he still has a tremendous working relationship and personal friendship with many congressional Republicans who’ve battled Barack Obama over every step the president has sought to make during his two terms in office.

The vice president also has a huge job that remains unfinished.

Why not, then, give him another four years to see this “moon shot” effort though?

Just a thought. I doubt seriously the Democratic nominee is going to heed this bit of advice.

But it’s out there, Mme. Secretary.

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.

High Plains Blogger

Tag Archives: cancer cure

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