Lieberman campaigns in Greenville

Inside the new Children's Hospital at Greenville Memorial Hospital Thursday, presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, left, talks with patient Braden Scarborough, 2, and his mother, Tonja Scarborough, 27. Staff/Owen Riley Jr. e-mail this story

Lieberman said GHS's cancer research laboratories fit perfectly with his proposed $150 billion American Center for Cures, a program to step up research into chronic diseases by funding clinical trials, research grants to speed drug development and large-scale research across disciplines.

"This was a most impressive and valuable visit and it relates directly to the proposal," Lieberman told reporters after the tour.

"We're living at a point in human history where miraculous progress in being made in laboratories, in breakthroughs in medical science," he said. "What we're not doing is investing enough money in focusing the effort to take the breakthroughs in the laboratory and bring them to the medicine cabinet and bedside, to not just treat diseases, but actually cure diseases."

Lieberman said the center will identify promising new treatments and help translate them into practical cures. It will work with companies that need its assistance – not with large pharmaceutical companies he said don't require such help.

He said the center would reduce bureaucratic barriers for innovative small companies and make up for short-term market forces that "currently cause drugmakers to invest more in big ticket blockbuster drugs like Viagra or Rogaine than in cures for the diseases which hold less immediate financial promise."

Lieberman, a US senator from Connecticut and the party's 2000 vice presidential nominee, is one of nine Democrats seeking 2004 nomination. South Carolina's presidential preference primary, on Feb. 3, as the first Southern contest and the nation's third, will play an early and pivotal role in settling who will challenge President George W. Bush.

After the GHS tour, he worked the partisan crowd at a campaign buffet at a West End restaurant, then met privately with black ministers at Springfield Baptist Church.

The state's Democratic primary electorate could be as much as 50 percent minority, making it a crucial constituency in a large field where no one candidate is likely to win a majority.

The state's primary is important because the winner can claim strength in the South, now largely a Republican stronghold, and its minority population provides a greater test than mostly white Iowa and New Hampshire, sites of the first two head-to-head contests.

The tour, with hospital officials in tow, focused on the cancer center and children's hospital.

Lieberman stepped into the room of two-year-old Braden Scarborough to chat with his parents.

Afterward, his mother, Tonja, 27, said she never expected to meet a presidential candidate in a children's hospital. Lieberman, she said, was "very warm, friendly and seemed genuinely concerned for Braden."

Scarborough, a 2000 Bush voter — "not Gore" — said she might have to consider Lieberman next year.

There was little doubt for biologist Nan Chen, encountered by Lieberman in one of the facilities laboratories.

With centrifuges whirring, Chen said, "I like him. I'm a Democratic supporter."

She also teaches biology at Converse College in Spartanburg.

During the 50-minute tour with Jerry Youkey, GHS's vice president for academic services, Lieberman posed several questions about the cancer center's financing and university affiliations.

On a day when the national unemployment rate shot up .4 percent to 6.4, Lieberman said it will heighten America's "concern and insecurity" about their jobs, the economy, their health care, retirement and personal safety.

"I think they're looking for new leadership and that's what I'm here to offer; strength in the world, strength at home, security and prosperity. We can do better than we're doing," he said. "We've got to go back to what worked during the Clinton-Gore years."

But Lieberman said Bush is right in taking a long look at international requests for U.S. military intervention in strife-torn Liberia.

"The U.S. has a responsibility to be part of an international effort, not a uniquely American effort, to try to bring about stability and peace there. We've got to be real careful not to repeat what happened in Somalia" when a U.S. humanitarian mission became bogged down in fighting local warlords and eventually withdrew in the early 1990s, Lieberman said.

— Dan Hoover covers politics and can be reached at 298-4883.