ONE Vote ‘08

I wanted to get this out there as a resource for HIV/AIDS advocacy in the upcoming US elections.  ONE Vote ‘08 is a “non-partisan campaign to make global health and extreme poverty foreign policy priorities in the 2008 presidential election.”  If you didn’t guess from the name, it’s a branch of the ONE Campaign.

According to yesterday’s article from the Kaiser Network,

Former Pennsylvania Sens. Rick Santorum (R) and Harris Wofford (D), who competed in a “bitter and high-profile” Senate race in the 1990s, are joining together to serve as state co-chairs of ONE Vote ’08 — which aims to bring attention to issues of extreme poverty and global disease, including HIV/AIDS, during the presidential campaign — the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The group [...] is co-chaired nationally by former Senate Majority Leaders Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

According to the same article,

Both presumptive presidential candidates Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) have already agreed to continue the Bush administration’s efforts to fight HIV/AIDS and malaria in low-income countries and to visit Africa during a first term, but Wofford said that does not eliminate the need for continued political pressure. Wofford said, “When there is common ground between the candidates on a good issue like this, it’s very important that it not be relegated to the periphery just because it’s not controversial.”

One of the things I really like about this is that it’s so committed to its non-partisan status.  Heaven knows, it can only be good for American politics to focus on big issues everyone agrees we need to tackle.

~ by h.e.g. on July 3, 2008.