When it comes to hubris, Gingrich has Obama beat

Don’t question Newt Gingrich’s plan to put a permanent base on the moon this decade. “I am sick of being told we have to be timid,” Gingrich said last week. He may have been trying to invoke John F. Kennedy’s moonshot, or Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America. But he sounded more like Barack Obama.

“We do big things,” Obama said in his 2011 State of the Union address, arguing that America needed to show its greatness through huge public-private ventures. Obama said “we’ve got to up our game” when it came it to green energy, manufacturing and other industries. In his inaugural, Obama denigrated people “who question the scale of our ambition.”