The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Candidates for office have a long history of promising the sun, the moon, and the stars to get votes, and the higher the office, the bigger the promises. Of course, the bigger the promises, the bigger the disappointment when they inevitably don’t deliver on them. But what one Democrats running for president is dangling in front of voters is not only not going to happen, it’s downright cruel to pretend it would be within his power.

All of the nearly two dozen Democrats running have promised some form of impossible dream, but Former Vice President Joe Biden is in a class by himself. The easy frontrunner half a year before anyone casts the first vote is promising to cure cancer.

“I’ve worked so hard in my career that I promise you, if I’m elected president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes America: We’re going to cure cancer,” Biden told a crowd in Iowa.

In a profession known for shamelessness, this might be the most disgustingly shameless political stunt ever.

The sick thing is Biden should know better. In 2015, he lost his oldest son Beau to brain cancer. The horror of that loss is unimaginable, but grief is no excuse for cruelty. And make no mistake about it, promising something like curing cancer, if elected, is the ultimate in cruelty.

Millions of American families, mine included, have lost members or have people diagnosed with cancer. My father just finished treatment for lung cancer. Luckily it was caught very early, thanks to a chest x-ray during a bout of pneumonia. If there was anything in the world I could do to ensure that treatment worked, including voting for a Democrat, I would do it in a heartbeat.

But I know how this game works. Unfortunately, far too many people don’t pay close enough attention to the news or history to know if a politician could read your mind and swear to the heavens they’ll give you what you desire most, they’d promise it. And that that promise would be as empty as all the rest they make. But to pledge to cure something so horrible “if elected” is beyond the pale. And Joe Biden should know better.

The fight to defeat this killer is not a political issue, and any medical advances are not dependent upon which political party occupies the Oval Office. There is no executive order or government check to be cut that will provide the miracle we all seek. To suggest as much is disgusting.

As disgusting as it is, Biden isn’t the first Democrat to promise to perform medical miracles “if elected.” In 2004, John Edwards, then their party’s nominee for Vice President, promised the crippled will walk again if he and John Kerry were elected. “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again,” Edwards said.

Christopher Reeve had already passed away after spending the last years of his life paralyzed from the neck down after a horse riding accident. The “miracle” Edwards was holding back then was stem cell research, and the villain he was casting was President George W. Bush for limiting research on fetal stem cells.

Kerry and Edwards lost, taking their secret cure with them, but Barack Obama won 4 years later and implemented the policies they’d been promising an election cycle earlier. Needless to say, the promised restoration of the use of limbs has not come to pass.

Nor, by the way, have any of the other miracles Democrats promised from stem cells come to pass. Turns out, as Republicans said, it wasn’t dependent upon who the President was, it’s dependent upon what the medical profession can accomplish. Someday, hopefully, these seemingly unattainable dreams will be reality – cures and treatments just a pill or shot away. But that future is not dependent upon your vote.

For Biden to promise something like curing cancer “if” he’s elected is a testament to just how low he will go to win, how desperately he wants to be president. It’s also why he shouldn’t be.

Derek is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe! Friday’s show featured a great interview with Shannon Bream of the Fox News Channel (find it here) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. It’s available now in hardcover, the paperback will be released Tuesday.