The Daily Caller links to a video of a speech in which Elton John praises former President George W. Bush and “conservative American politicians” for pledging billions of dollars to “save the lives of Africans with HIV.”
“We’ve seen George W. Bush and conservative American politicians pledge tens of billions to save the lives of Africans with HIV. Think of all the love. Think of where we’d be without it, nowhere, that’s where. We’d be nowhere at all,” John said at the International AIDS conference in Washington on Monday. “Thanks to all this compassion, thanks to all this love, more than 8 million people are in treatment. Thanks to people who have chosen to care and to act, we can see an end to this epidemic on the horizon.”
Elton John is onto something, as this story in the Washington Post makes clear. It reports that leaders in AIDS vaccine research say they may finally be on the cusp of a period of major discovery leading to a vaccine. “The past few years have been a turning point,” said Gary Nabel, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “I’m more optimistic than I’ve probably ever been in my career.”
As for President Bush, in 2003 he announced the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the largest program in history to fight a single disease. The plan included $15 billion over five years to promote prevention, treatment, and compassionate care, mainly in Africa. Many at the time were skeptical that large-scale AIDS treatment was even possible in the developing world. But a study at the University of British Columbia found that PEPFAR saved 1.2 million lives in just its first three years.
It has never been clear to me why this achievement is celebrated more by those on the left (like Elton John and Bono) than on the right. Perhaps it’s because of the nature of the disease and its early association in this country with the gay community. Perhaps it’s because such enormous good was achieved through the instrument of the federal government, which conservatives are instinctively wary of. Or perhaps it’s because the disease has historically afflicted people who have, in different ways and to varying degrees, been marginalized and are not part of the conservative coalition: gays, African villagers, IV drug users, and minorities in America.
To be clear: conservatives haven’t denigrated the global AIDS initiative; it’s simply that it has never really registered with them. It hasn’t touched their moral imagination.
We are all drawn to different things and animated by different causes. But I would have thought that an effort that has so clearly served the cause of human dignity – that has saved so many lives and prevented so much suffering – would be one that people of every political persuasion, including conservatives (particularly social conservatives and those active in the pro-life movement), would be held up far more often than it is. The global AIDS initiative has been an extraordinary human achievement that fits our national character.
I understand that discussing AIDS policy may not make for riveting political theater. But there is also a great human drama in emancipating millions of people from the bondage of fear and the grip of death; and there is great drama, too, in the story of a moral leader who was able to bend history in the direction of justice.
Leave it to Elton John to point that out.
I was somewhat taken aback by the AIDS conference when I learned that more than 13,000 had descended upon Washington for it. I have to wonder what 13,000 people are actually going to do to fix anything in a 3-5 day conference. To me it seems that being seen at humanitarian 'events' is an industry unto itself.
I'm not sure conservatives deserve the criticism here. The Heritage Foundation was big into the reauthorization of PEPFAR in 2008, and was instrumental in preventing the left from hijacking the program (more than they did). Conservative Senators Tom Coburn and John Kyl played significant roles in that legislative fight to preserve the conservative approach to foreign aid that was central to the original bill–often being criticized from left (and by Michael Gerson) and praised by the right (e.g. the editorial page of the Wall St. Journal) in the process. Of course, one problem with the approach, and one reason for conservative disappointment with the program, has been that the original conservative vision of the program–distributing expensive drugs at low costs through churches and civic organizations to Africans–has gone through mission creep. PEPFAR has been folded into something Obama calls the Global Health Initiative, which is designed to take the billions set aside for AIDS drugs and redirect them into elementary education, women's property rights advocacy, raising awareness of Third World stigma against the transgendered, and much, much more. PEPFAR is a perfect case study of compassionate conservatism–its strengths and its potentially fatal weaknesses.
I'm sure many people went to the event for the unseemly egotistical reasons that Empress Trudy suggests.But I'm equally certain that many attended because they've lost loved ones to the disease. Non-violent rallies are , in most cases, attempts to sway opinion and point to causes.The symbolic character of this event shouldn't be held against it-it's simply the very nature of collective lobbying. And to reduce the event to the posturing and delusional self importance of many of the attendees is to practice a too easy and mechanical psychological reductionism.Peter Wehner got to the heart of the matter,and got it just right.