In his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil crisis, President Obama invoked the 1960s space program as proof of America’s limitless technological capacity. “The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet,” Obama said. “The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon.”
The only problem was, when Obama referred to “this challenge,” he wasn’t talking about the Gulf oil leak. He was, rather, referring to the goal of creating environmentally-friendly energy in the future, and more specifically to his immediate goal of passing a cap-and-trade bill. For Obama, the space program shows that America has the ingenuity and know-how to find new sources of energy: If we can put a man on the moon, then we can create a clean-energy future. But as they watched the speech, some Americans, perhaps millions of Americans, had another reaction:
If we can put a man on the moon, Mr. President, then why can’t we stop the leak?
Stopping the leak — now believed to be shooting between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf each day — was a topic the president sidestepped during his 18-minute speech. And yet polls show it is the most pressing priority for Americans when they think about the Gulf oil disaster, with many Americans wondering whether the federal government has really done everything that can be done to stop the flow of oil. Hearing the president invoke American technological genius in the service of his political goal — a cap-and-trade bill — while remaining silent on the application of that technological genius to the problem at hand in the Gulf cannot have increased the public’s confidence in Obama’s ability to handle the crisis.
