Bush on Mars?

Do you spend much time worrying about how to enhance America's national greatness? Don't feel bad, if you're too busy with other concerns. But in Washington, there are people -- policy wonks, think tankers, writers -- who get paid to do so.

Not too long ago, I was invited to participate on a panel discussion of one new proposal to boost U.S. glory. The host was the Hudson Institute, a conservative outfit that attempts to interest rightwingers in issues not traditionally part of the conservative movement (such as national service), and the proposer was James Pinkerton, who was the domestic policy guru in the first George Bush administration -- an administration not known for its domestic policy.

Pinkerton, now a pundit-columnist who moonlights as a big-thinker, had written a paper that called on the current Bush-in-the-White-House to press an agenda more inspiring than tax cuts/tax cuts/tax cuts, to identify his presidency with an exciting new idea, to harness what Richard Nixon (that well-known visionary) once called "the lift of a driving dream." And Pinkerton has a specific idea in mind; he wants Bush to boldly go where no current national political figure has gone -- to declare a full-blow national project to expand American civilization into outerspace.

Pinkerton is trying to raise the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, who, at the turn of the century, embraced the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan. A Navy officer, Mahan wrote a trend-setting book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, in which he argued that a great nation had to expand.

"Nations, like men, however strong, decay when cut off from the external activities and resources which at once draw out and support their internal powers," Mahan maintained. "A nation...cannot live indefinitely off itself, and the easiest way by which it can communicate with other peoples and renew itself is the sea."

Replace "sea" with "space" and you have the essence of Pinkerton's case. He is urging Bush to emulate Roosevelt and pursue America's "manifest destiny" into the heavens (where, unlike the unsettled portions of North America in the 1800s, there are no indigenous people to massacre -- as far as we know). This "next imperialism," Pinkerton asserts, could provide the Bush Administration with an organizing principle that captures the imagination of Americans. In the post-Cold War era, it would offer a sense of mission that a great nation supposedly needs.

It also, he adds, would slyly cloak Bush's push for a national missile defense system in grander, more romantic terms. ("If Bush were to lead the way upward as well as outward, he would get his missile defense along the way.") Bush the Younger, according to Pinkerton, needs to think "large" -- "to unleash the human potential across the solar system." If Bush does, Pinkerton declares in his paper, "he would be enshrined in the historical pantheon of explorer princes, alongside Leif Ericsson, Henry the Navigator, and Ferdinand and Isabella." National greatness will boom.

After Pinkerton presented this idea to several dozen people in the conference room of the Hudson Institute, I was one of three respondents to critique his proposal. (This is what think tanks in Washington do at lunchtime.) Having once been a child who built model rockets and joined an astronomy club, an adolescent who memorized Star Trek episodes and was obsessed with UFOs (I once saw a flying saucer -- along with a dozen other people -- but I basically don't believe in them), and a young adult who attended Sun Ra concerts and drunkenly chanted "space is the place," I had to admit that I have a weak spot for space exploration. But I noted it's ridiculous to think of George W. Bush as a heroic figure who can lead the nation beyond its terrestrial limits -- even if that were a desirable goal. (T.R., by the way, is John McCain's hero. Bush has a bust of Eisenhower on his desk.)