By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 5, 2005
7:09 AM
In the 1980s and 1990s, Monsanto CEO Richard J. Mahoney spent much of his energy battling the forces of the political left that sought to stigmatize and ban foods produced in the new frontier of genetic modification.
Today, Mahoney, a lifelong Republican and retired from the business world, finds himself in a similar position, but with a much different adversary. Now he rails against the forces of the religious right that seek to stifle the new frontier of science -- stem cell research.
Mahoney lives in the St. Louis area and devotes much of his energy to academia at Washington University, where he is a trustee. He is also among a prominent group of business leaders, mostly from St. Louis and Kansas City, who have sought to build the Show Me State into one of the nation's premier biotechnology and agriculture science centers. Opposition to stem cell research, they believe, not only stifles good science but also threatens the state's business growth.
The battle between Mahoney and his cohort of old-school Republicans -- typified by the business elite and the country club crowd -- and the new guard -- typified by rural and suburban social conservatives in the vast swath between the state's two major metropolitan areas -- underscores the emerging schism in the party.
Much in the same way that free trade splinters the Democratic Party, stem cell research exposes ideological cracks in the GOP. Those cracks are giving Democrats hope of regaining power in states such as Missouri that have trended Republican of late.
If MTV were trying to highlight the issue, it could do a "Celebrity Death Match" between two of Missouri's favorite sons: socially moderate former senator and U.N. ambassador John Danforth and socially conservative former senator and U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft.
Mahoney comes down squarely in the Danforth corner. Danforth urges moderate Christians to take a more active role in his party, and he advocates stem cell research.
"Do I think a lot of Republicans are going to go out and vote for Democrats because of this?" Mahoney said rhetorically last week. "No. But if the independents start leaving, this could be the thing that pushes them to do that."
I met Mahoney last week at a conference in Cape Cod sponsored by Washington University's Weidenbaum Center -- named for Murray Weidenbaum, a former top economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan -- and the George Mason University Department of Economics. At the conference, journalists from around the country participated in seminars led by mostly conservative and libertarian economists from George Mason, Washington University and the University of Chicago.
Mahoney comes off as a smooth, gregarious, self-deprecating patrician, tooling around Cape Cod in a pink button-down shirt, with a sweater tied around his neck, boat shoes on his feet. He is the prototypical economic conservative, lecturing on the glories of the free enterprise system, railing against government regulation and taxation.
For years while running Monsanto, the St. Louis-based mega-biotech firm, he served as the company's pitchman for genetically modified foods, which the company was on the forefront of developing. He spent much of his time on the public relations campaign to assure the public of the safety of such foods, which have now become common in the United States, and increasingly so in other parts of the world such as Europe, where liberal politicians, lawmakers and regulators once had success keeping them out of the market.
Mahoney retired happily and very comfortably from Monsanto in 1995, but kept up his profile in St. Louis with a string of academic, philanthropic and community endeavors.
One night, I overheard him talking to a group of journalists about his anger over President Bush's opposition to public funding of stem cell research.
Bush has prohibited federal funding to research of all but some already existing stem cell lines because that avoids destruction of future embryos. And he has said he would veto a bill before Congress that would provide funding for research using embryos left over from fertility treatments.
States and private entities are free to fund stem cell research.
Some conservative Republicans in Washington, including Missouri Sen. Jim Talent (R), have proposed criminalizing a certain form of stem cell research -- somatic cell nuclear transfer -- a technique commonly used to produce embryonic stem cells and known to some as therapeutic cloning.
In January, Republicans took control of both chambers of the Missouri legislature and the statehouse for the first time in 84 years. Among the first pieces of major legislation the party pushed was a total ban on somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).
Central to the debate over the procedure is the question of whether the process involves cloning, which opponents argue creates life for the sole purpose of destroying it.
"This is the preeminent threat to early human life we're now facing in our society," Larry Webster, executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference, told the Kansas City Star in April. ''Many pro-life citizens of this state recognize human cloning for what it is."
The Columbia Missourian reported earlier this spring that the controversy of Talent's position was leading to a flurry of interest among Democrats in challenging him next year when he comes up for reelection.
The business community, led by many prominent Republicans, rose up to oppose the legislation, which has stalled in Jefferson City.
The Stowers Institute for Medical Research, an influential national biomedical research corporation in Kansas City, vowed to withhold spending $250 million to $300 million on a major new campus in the city. Wealthy business and community leaders, like St. Louis philanthropist Sam Fox -- one of the biggest GOP donors in the state -- and members of the prominent Danforth family, have spoken out vociferously against the proposed legislation.
"The uncertainty that prevents the Stowers Institute from building its second facility in Kansas City will persist until the threat of anti-SCNT legislation in Missouri is finally laid to rest," William Neaves, president and chief executive officer of the institute, told the Kansas City Star in April.
Mahoney told me he had written out a campaign check to Talent, but could not bring himself to send it.
"I just couldn't do it," he said.
I asked Mahoney if he'd be willing to chat some more about the issue. He agreed, and the next day, we went to lunch at the Hyannis Yacht Club, where he is a member. Over Bloody Mary's (we each had only one, thank you), he told me that while the stem cell research issue had not reached critical political mass in Missouri, it threatened to become a signature wedge issue in years to come.
Even though he despises the characterization, Mahoney, who retired from Monsanto a decade ago, epitomizes the old-school, country club, Rockefeller Republican. His type long dominated the party. They were wealthier than average, conservative economically but often quite moderate on social issues.
But the party has increasingly come to be dominated by low- and middle-class, religious voters. After helping the party rise to dominance in recent years, these groups have expected their party to repay them in kind by focusing on their issues. Too often, the party's elite courted their votes, and then forgot their issues once they came to power, focusing almost exclusively on taxation and regulation issues.
In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, one third of the respondents said they supported President Bush's handling of the stem cell research, while 55 percent opposed it.
Over lunch, Mahoney, a practicing Catholic, spoke excitedly of the potential for stem cell research. No, there was no guarantee it would lead to curing a vast array of diseases and debilitating diseases, but we'll never know without an extensive commitment to research, he argued.
Mahoney tried to be humble. He's far less politically active today than when he was running Monsanto, he said. But he says when Bush campaign folks came seeking a contribution last year, he told them no. He said he won't help people who oppose stem cell research on the state level either.
He didn't want to talk details, but he said he's working with a group of business and academic leaders to get an initiative on the ballot in Missouri next year to explicitly allow public and private funding of stem cell research.
And he warned me not to interpret this as a sign that he was through with his party.
"What was I supposed to do last year, vote for Kerry?" said Mahoney, joking that he might have been the only person in his native Massachusetts to vote for Richard Nixon. "I don't think so. ... No, I'm a Republican. But I don't have to work hard for them or give them my money, either."
Staff writer Mary Specht contributed to this report.