If Barack Obama is to win over Americans with his faith in the guiding hand of government to foster a new golden age of U.S. innovation, you might say he must first win back Wisconsin.
Mr. Obama won the Badger State by 14 percentage points over John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. But Wisconsin turned on him, and everything else Democratic, in last fall's state and congressional elections.
Once dependably Democrat, the state went all red – sweeping its pro-Obama senator out of office, handing both chambers of the state legislature to Republicans and replacing its Democratic governor with a GOP one.
And not just any Republican governor. Scott Walker has never seen a government program he didn't want to eviscerate. Even before he was sworn in, he said "thanks, but no thanks" to Mr. Obama's offer of $800-million (U.S.) in stimulus spending to develop a high-speed rail line in the state.
Mr. Walker is not a big fan of wind energy, either – especially the subsidized kind. In fact, he's making his state increasingly inhospitable to alternative energy companies of all sorts. Just last week, he pulled a $100-million subsidy promised by his predecessor to a signature biomass project.
Wisconsin voters were offered a very different vision on Wednesday when Mr. Obama visited a solar power company in Manitowoc. There, the President made his pitch to up America's game with a government-led drive to boost innovation, education and infrastructure.
The President built on the theme of his Tuesday night State of the Union speech and his call for the United States to "out-innovate, out-educate and out-build" the rest of the world to stave off its own decline.
"The nation that leads the world in clean energy will lead the global economy in the 21st century," Mr. Obama told workers at Orion Energy Systems, a small company that develops energy-efficient lighting. "This is not something that I'm making up to fill up time in a speech. China is making these investments. They have already captured a big chunk of the solar market partly because we fell down on the job."
The White House advance team had clearly done its homework in choosing Manitowoc for the President's first post-SOTU trip. A piece of the Sputnik-1 Soviet satellite fell to earth in the Wisconsin city in 1960.
A previous generation of Americans rose to the innovation challenge after the Soviet Union became the first nation to launch a man-made satellite into space. And on Tuesday night, Mr. Obama likened America's current economic challenges to this generation's "Sputnik moment."
But whether Mr. Obama can implement his proposals for new investments in research, education and infrastructure depends not only on his ability to get them through Congress, where Republicans now control the House of Representatives and a bigger bloc of seats in the Senate.
To realize his vision, Mr. Obama also needs to win the support of most governors, since states control the vast majority of education and infrastructure spending. And federal subsidies alone are unlikely to be enough to spur the clean-energy revolution Mr. Obama wants. State incentives are crucial. But with 29 Republican governors – up from 21 before last fall's elections – Mr. Obama faces a tough sell.
Florida's new GOP governor, Rick Scott, has yet to decide whether to accept $2.4-billion in federal money to develop high-speed rail in his state. But, on Wednesday, he was quick to dismiss Mr. Obama's Sputnik analogy.
"To face the challenges of our day, we don't need decades-old history lessons, we need leadership," Mr. Scott countered.
Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, his Wisconsin trip coincided with the release of the latest estimate for this year's federal deficit by the Congressional Budget Office. The shortfall is now expected to hit $1.5-trillion for the year that ends Sept. 30, up from $1.3-trillion in fiscal 2010.
The news served to steel Republicans' resolve to block any new spending and demand immediate program cuts. They attacked Mr. Obama for not making deficit reduction his top priority.
But addressing America's structural deficit – which will only get bigger as Social Security and Medicare engulf the budget – is a collective conundrum even more daunting than winning a space race.
"Mr. Obama articulated the importance of deficit reduction. But he was unwilling to tackle the really hard questions … that would really make a dent in the deficit," offered Costas Panagopoulos, a professor of political science at Fordham University in New York. "He didn't do that because these are very tough questions to answer. … It's a very risky topic."
In Wisconsin, Mr. Obama devoted only a single line to the subject, referring to the need to take "responsibility for our deficits."
Will that be enough to win back Wisconsinites?
Konrad Yakabuski