Obama at the wheel!

Obama’s Top Priority: Spark a New Energy Economy - October 27, 2008
by Jessie Jenkins of It's Getting Hot In Here: Dispatches from the Youth Climate Movement

Barack Obama’s top priority if elected president is to launch an Apollo-style national project to build a new, clean energy economy. That’s what he told Time magazine reporter Joe Klein last week.
With America’s economy rocked by a one-two-punch of spiking energy prices this summer and the credit crisis this fall, our nation needs a president with a clear sense of how to free our nation from dependency on oil and a plan to get America back to work. And with climate change continuing unchecked, we need a president that will take the lead in building a post-carbon energy system. A national project to build a new, clean energy economy is the right answer to these interlinking challenges, and Obama knows it.

From Time:
[Obama] has a clearer handle on the big picture, on how various policy components fit together, and a strong sense of what his top priority would be. He wants to launch an “Apollo project” to build a new alternative-energy economy. His rationale for doing so includes some hard truths about the current economic mess: “The engine of economic growth for the past 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20. That was consumer spending. Basically, we turbocharged this economy based on cheap credit.” But the days of easy credit are over, Obama said, “because there is too much deleveraging taking place, too much debt.” A new economic turbocharger is going to have to be found, and “there is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy … That’s going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office.“

Hold him to it! And I will believe it when I see it!

The hard work of the Obama supporters at the poll here in Oxford did not pay off for Mississippi, who went red instead of blue. But it seems that much of the hard work paid off elsewhere.

Let's hope for the future of these little tykes that Obama can pull together a plan, a nation and an economy that has been so thoroughly poisoned by foreign oil and politics.