The former head of the National Human Genome Research Institute wrote an op-ed in the Virginia-Pilot endorsing Barack Obama for president. The Pilot has a modest readership of 186,500, is losing its local ownership to a national news conglomerate, and competes with The Daily Press in a tri-county region of 1.7 million, many of which military.
Collins, a Virginia native, is a moderately well-known scientist–lodged somewhere between Steven Pinker and E.O. Wilson in the national conscious. Using his hometown paper as his moment of political coming-out, instead of the more obvious New York Times, makes some sense. However, his keeping-it-real gesture and his timing are not without political merit. The majority of American’s polled who actually watched the last debate said Obama swept the floor with McCain’s hairplugs. On the day Collins’ article was published Obama had a 12 point lead over McCain in this Tracking Poll. Not only is McCain unpopular, but Obama’s numbers haven’t fallen below 50 this month.
The Virginia-Pilot doesn’t make op-eds available online, so I placed a scanned copy below. The format is typical: begin with a few statistics to add legitimacy then proscribe away. But this is an op-ed piece, and Collins opines gingerly, outlining Obama’s outline of science and technology initiatives in a soon to be Democrat controlled White House and Congress. Ho-hum.
After suffering under the yolk of an Administration whose politicization of science sunk to never-before-seen fathoms, whose cronyism filled environmental regulatory agencies with corporate foxes–and whose political litmus tests blacklisted others from hundreds of federal advisory committees–whose cynicism cravenly kowtowed to a small yet annoying coterie of fundamentalist retards, thus allowing the actual, unthinkable possibility of creationism entering the classroom–and the no less shameful banning of human stem cell research and ignorant cautioning against creating ungodly chimeric abominations in the laboratory, whose systematic misrepresentation of the data muzzled its own–and in some cases had them fired–when their results didn’t jive with republican talking points, and whose initial failing to fill key scientific posts, such as naming a presidential science adviser and NIH director, was a damaging sanction placed upon every American scientist from day one. Taken together this is a vile epidemic and Collins the M.D. rises to the occasion:
As a citizen, a scientist, a physician and a son of Virginia, I am deeply concerned about these trends and continued lack of National leadership.
Whoa! Now that Collins has resigned, free of the Hatch Act that checks the mouths of all federal employees (ahem), he wastes no time charging in, guns blazing, with strong words for the current Administration’s bad ideas and McCain’s identical ones. Behold more righteous indignation:
I regret to say that I have found little comfort in Sen. John McCain’s plan.
Hot dog. Them’s fighting words. Or, this is a political maneuver to curry favor with the next president. And as with all politcal maneuvers, there’s a rush to the middle-ground: that wasteland of words, that Clintonian triangulation of opaque rhetoric. For the last eight years Collins collected a paycheck from the federal government, was witness in real-time to the damage done, and no-doubt felt the financial strangulation of basic research in his own institute for close to a decade. And now, his first public response is barely a vertebrae above spineless, a wag of the finger. I say, if you want to play politics, go in whole hog or don’t go in at all.
