Only So Much Magic Can Do : But there’s a whole lot more President George Bush can do

President Bush has made but one speech on AIDS in nearly three years. Now he says he is ready to go the extra mile in the nation’s fight against the deadly disease.

That is how the President greeted the courageous way that Earvin (Magic) Johnson went public with his testing positive for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of AIDS. The White House may think that asking Johnson to join the National Commission on AIDS--itself a splendid idea--is a step along the route of that extra mile.

But it would also help if the President sat down and read the report that this same commission sent to him in September. It is one long anguished scream for leadership, more money and better coordination of government programs to give the nation any chance to limit suffering and death in the AIDS epidemic.

In it, Bush would find a recommendation that HIV must be discussed in “unvarnished” language, not the euphemisms so common in urging people to abstain, or even to practice “safe sex.” Side by side, he would find government stifling studies of sexual behavior because the questions are too explicit.

The commission complains that Americans are increasingly retreating into a shell of “resentful indifference” about AIDS. But it says that perhaps Americans are not to blame for assuming that silence on the subject of AIDS at the White House and elsewhere in Washington “means that nothing important has happened.”

The commission wants universal health-care coverage, partly because Americans are entitled to it and partly because it may be the only way to promote AIDS education, prevention counseling and early treatment of HIV diagnosis and treatment. Nearly one-third of AIDS patients today have no insurance at all, private or public.

Magic Johnson can help enormously in the AIDS fight, but he cannot govern or implement the commission’s 30 urgent proposals. About 1 million Americans are already infected. Someone now dies of AIDS in this country every 15 minutes. Even if there were never another case of infection, the commission says, the epidemic would worsen for 10 more years. It is high time for that extra mile.