Over at the Transterrestrial Musings weblog, Jim McDade comments on whether Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is NASA’s “friend or enemy”. The commentary takes some odd turns, but the gist of his comment is that Kerry does not take NASA very seriously because he lumps it under his “agenda for urban America” on his campaign web site. In fact, if you read it, you’ll see that he argues for increasing the research funding for NASA (along with the Energy Department and NSF) as a way to revitalize the high-technology sector. McDade also takes the Kerry campaign to task for not listing space among the 28 different policy topics on his web site. I think it would be very difficult to make the argument that space policy is among the top 28 topics in this presidential campaign.
There’s also one thing McDade missed in his commentary. If you use the comment form on Kerry’s campaign web site, you’re asked to file your comment under one of about 30 different categories, most of which are various policy issues. One of those categories is “Space budget and NASA”. This would seem to indicate that either the campaign is getting enough messages on this topic to warrant its own category, or that they anticipate getting a lot of messages on the topic. Stay tuned: November is a long way away…
Jim’s in Alabama, so space is obviously much higher than #28 on the priority list for him
I have read a number of analyses of how Kerry might lean on space policy and the more I read the more confused I get. It is not so much Kerry, as the question of what criteria one would actually use to assess this issue. As several people have noted, it is probably not best to use his campaign rhetoric as a yardstick. Yes, he has led chants of “Send Bush to Mars,” obviously implying that the Bush space plan is unwise. But it is probably much more accurate to say that this issue is unimportant to him and all his public statements on it so far are simply campaign tactics.
However… at the end of the day, all you are left with is the public statements and the other indicators. We lack a crystal ball to figure out what his administration would really do on this subject. Without other data, you have to take the candidate at his word.
Revitalizing the high-technology (aerospace) sector has been a theme in several high-level reports over the years, but the problem has not yet been addressed in any serious way.
Apparently, at least one person in Sen. Kerry’s campaign understands that renewing aerospace infrastructure (rather than generating spin-offs) could/should be an important pragmatic justification for a future NASA.
Space is obviously not going to be a vote winner this election, so I can understand why Sen. Kerry is noncommittal on the exploration initiative. If he becomes president, I expect that events will force him to move forward on at least one major space initiative. As long as he doesn’t back himself into a corner with strong and unjustified comments against space exploration, then I’m not holding it against him.
Without other data, you have to take the candidate at his word.
Not when his word changes weekly. It’s hard to grant the Senator any credibility on any topic when it comes to his future positions or actions.
D’oh! That first sentence was a quote from Dwayne’s post–it was supposed to be italicized. Jeff, you should warn commenters that HTML isn’t allowed.