A young American president stood before the country nearly 50 years ago and crisply defined a goal that would mobilize America’s restless strength and its spirit bred on the frontiers of its history.

We will go to the moon, John F. Kennedy said. We can go to the moon. We have the resources. We have the skills. And now, he was saying, we have a challenge. The challenge was the Soviet Union’s head start in space, the first human-made satellite whirling thousands of miles above us.

America was not as troubled then, in 1961, as it was today. But the trouble would come in a few years: War in Viet Nam, blood in the streets in America, a president, Lyndon Johnson, under siege.

Today in America, we’re floundering in a malaise fed by the collapse of bedrock financial and credit institutions allowed to run scorched earth scams that ruthlessly overwhelmed millions of people. It has been fed by an eight-year partnership of industrial and political power operating under cynical agendas kept secret from the people. It has led the country into rising unemployment, failing schools and denied tens of millions proper health care. It has also triggered unsettled wars, with more threatened.

In the midst of this is the spreading disintegration of a middle class beaten down by a government that would not regulate the runaway greed of corporate power and by the outsourcing of their jobs—what one commentator called the creation of new American sweatshops 10,000 miles away. Add the systematic theft of the public treasury by war profiteers and billion dollar tax gifts to billionaires.

So why should we remember John Kennedy’s speech today? We should because the new president of the United States will have a forum to mobilize America again, and especially younger America, toward a goal more important than the moon and space. And this is to face and ultimately end our ruinous dependency on fuels that threaten the future of the earth as well as own livelihoods. From there the path to renewable energy needs to be clear and irreversible. And the country has to believe in it.

Kennedy’s summons to the American people went deeper than the political and the military payoffs of winning a race with a competitive power.

Between the lines the young president was telling America this: We can come together by doing something that expands our lives and those in the rest of the world. We can look on the exploration of space as both an adventure and a serious mission with benefits that may not have entered our minds or our dreams.

In less than 10 years after the young president spoke, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon on July 21, 1969.

But when you examine the actual bottom line of the American commitment to explore space, you have to go beyond men on the moon and closeups of Mars. Tick them off: weather satellites, solar technology, ultrasound machines, laser surgery, infrared medical thermometers, programmable pacemakers, high-speed long distance telephone service, automatic insulin pumps, CAT scans, radiation-blocking sunglasses and the GPS phenomena, all of which we have today.

A senator I know said not long ago that the space race created a nation looking at the stars. It also created a nation of people working in factories, schools and mines to make those innovations work for everybody. Good jobs, purposeful jobs, in an America confident in its own strength again and a genuine leader of the world once more.

These things are possible today.

When we stop grumbling about the endless campaign and the spins and the blunders and the economic chaos , we will remember that this country has been at its best and greatest, has come together, when it has put its trust not only in a leader but in the energies and strength of its people. When you look around, you can probably find at least one candidate for the White House who fits the profile, or can grow into it.

---Jim Klobuchar

© 2008 Jim Klobuchar