What's been missing in America's trade policy is a preference for Americans. The object of trade in China is to help the Chinese nation. German trade is designed to help Germany; Scandinavian, to help the Scandinavian nations. This is not the case here. General Electric goes abroad to lower costs and boost profits. Goldman Sachs invests abroad in the same kind of low-wage, high-profit enterprises. That's the mission of such businesses. But the U.S. government has never taken on the mission of defending the American economy, or the American people, in the global economy. That is not the only reason the broadly shared prosperity of the three decades following World War II is now a distant memory, but it is a certainly a major reason. In the absence of such a national economic strategy, is it any wonder that by margins of better than two to one, Americans now oppose free trade?

It’s not that Obama doesn’t know the anodyne, wifely things to say (essentially, nothing). She is, after all, a “community and external affairs” professional. But her pride visibly chafes at being asked to subsume her personality, to make herself seem duller and less independent than she is, even in the service of getting her husband elected President of the United States.

Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”

First Ladies have traditionally gravitated toward happy topics like roadside flower beds, so it comes as a surprise that Obama’s speech is such an unrelenting downer. Obama acknowledged to me that some advisers have lobbied her to take a sunnier tone, with little success.

"These are issues worth discussing," said Shawn Lawrence Otto, chief executive officer of Science Debate 2008. "Because of the huge impact that science and technology is having on our lives and our policies, voters have a right to assess the candidates on these topics -- and candidates have an obligation to tell voters what they're thinking."

Science and technology are responsible for half of America's post-World War II economic growth, said Otto, but scientific primacy is shifting rapidly to Asia. "To maintain American economic strength going forward, we need to find a way to deal with that -- and the candidates have been virtually silent," he said.

An even larger issue is climate change, which has been identified by the global scientific community as an imminent and almost certainly catastrophic threat.

"Is there a greater moral imperative than the ongoing viability of the planet?" he asked. "Science is about practical solutions to moral questions."