Michael Barone‘s latest Washington Examiner column dissects the portions of President Obama’s State of the Union address that focused on the future of technology:
Barack Obama, like all American politicians, likes to portray himself as future-oriented and open to technological progress. Yet the vision he set out in his State of the Union address is oddly antique and disturbingly static.
“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he said. But Sputnik and America’s supposedly less advanced rocket programs of 1957 were government projects, at a time when government defense spending, like the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, drove technology.
But today, as Obama noted a few sentences before, “our free enterprise system is what drives innovation.” Private firms develop software faster than government can procure it.
Undaunted, Obama calls for more government spending on “biomedical research, information technology and especially clean energy technology.” Government has some role in biotech, though a subsidiary one, but IT development is almost exclusively a private-sector function and clean energy technology that is not private-sector-driven is almost inevitably uneconomic.
And then there is transportation. “Within 25 years,” Obama said, “our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. This could allow you,” he said breathlessly, “to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying.”
Wow! There’s some advanced technology. Except that France inaugurated service on its TGV high-speed rail from Paris to Lyon in 1981. That’s 30 years ago. It’s as if President Eisenhower was inspired by Sputnik to promote the technology of 30 years before, Charles Lindbergh’s single-engine propeller plane the Spirit of St. Louis. It’s as antique as the Tomorrowland of the original Disneyland.
