The ultimate promise of bioscience is perfect health in perpetual youth. Even if it's not overtly acknowledged, that is always whispering just beneath the surface. You don't think "the public" will care about that??
Really, you evos and IDers overestimate the publics concern over this all of this.
What if the Pope cam out for ID? What would that do?
Besides, you make it sound like the Dem's tack on the stem cell issue has that much traction. Bush's position is pretty reasonable here, and most people seem to agree with it when they actually find out what it is.
On one have you seem to be saying that the public will side rationally with the eveo side because they "rational, logical positivists" and on the other you seem to be saying that they can be "bludgeoned" with rhetoric, and "tempted with eternal life" (a pretty silly formulation - and a demeaning estimation of the American people, BTW) You cannot have it both ways, it would seem to me.
Believe me, having high school kids in Kansas spend two weeks hearing about ID is not going to move us "back to the dark ages," or somehow "stop bioscience<" and you evos do not help your cause with this sort of hysterical "warnings."
Do you really think the voter believe that this will keep them "from eternal life?"
Do you really think that the voter is so stupid to buy all the outrageous claim coming out from the stem cell crowd, when it is pretty obvious that they are yet again rattling a cup? We have been through the "War on Cancer" and the "War on AIDS," but to little avail. This aspect of the Evo argument seems pretty childish from the outside looking in. As the teacher lobby has begun to be seen as just another interest group at the trough, so do scientist risk this perception the more they are seen as political actor.
Perhaps the Left will be successful here, but it will be a phyrric victory in the end. The self-ipmortant posturings of the Earth sciences crowd, the evo crowd, the gay is biological crowd. the diverity crowd, etc is wearing a little thin. When we have Harvard taking the wholly irrational view that the problem with a "manpower" shortage is some how solved by "empowering women scientist" is is profoundly hard to take the academy seriously when one hears their cries about "the sanctity of science."
I think that you are falling for the Left's notion that they are they "rational; and scientific" ones when they are in fact pretty full of gobbledygook themselves. In fact, ID seems pretty mild here compared to what the left has been up too for years.
As someone with no dog in this fight, I will tell you that the stridency and seemingly mortification of you evos becomes you little in the public square.
It just goes to show that it is not just the Left that has contempt for "the public."
In the end the American people will chose correctly given and honest means of doing so.