It's not often that I can praise William Safire.
The best twist phrase in this piece is "pro-living," which is a clever rhetorical response to the phrase "pro-life": "I'm with the hopers on this, and also hope President Bush opens his mind to the medical scientists' patient-oriented, pro-living position." I hadn't come across the phrase before. I did a google search on "pro-life pro-living", and it looks like a few others are using it the way Safire is here, but not many.
A challenging point in this piece is the bit about therapeutic cloning. We're all against reproductive cloning, but what if science could clone a defective kidney? An amputated limb? Wouldn't we support "cloning" research that might lead to such possibilities?