Byron York offers Washington Examiner readers a brief analysis of the president’s latest prime-time speech:
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?
