Rivals’ visions differ on unleashing innovation

McCain as committee leader
The golden age of American invention began after World War II, when the government and industry poured big money into research and produced advanced goods like the transistor, the laser, new drugs, fiber optics, new kinds of jets and spacecraft, modems and the desktop computer. All were exported in vast quantities.

Signs of trouble appeared in September and October of 1995, when the nation registered its first negative balances of trade in advanced technology goods, according to the Foreign Trade Division at the Census Bureau.

In 1997, Senator McCain, of Arizona, became chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, beginning a tenure that, with an interruption in 2001 and 2002, went until early 2005.

Though often approving of business and deregulation, he could reverse course if the issue impinged on what he saw as national security. An early initiative of his sought to restrict American exports of certain high-tech goods, even as the Clinton administration pushed for trade liberalization.

“It’s critical that safeguards are in place,” he said in opening a 1998 hearing on missile and satellite exports to China. Later, Republicans charged the Clinton administration with dangerous irresponsibility in allowing the Chinese to import high-performance computers. Getting the export issue right, Mr. McCain said at a hearing in 2000, is “one of the greatest challenges of our time.”

The drive helped tighten export regulations. But technology analysts faulted the attack as political and the tightening as unnecessary.

James A. Lewis, an export specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, wrote in 2001 that the new system “expends enormous resources on trivial and unimportant security risks” and threatens to damage important sectors of the economy, like the defense industry. The Republicans “closed off space exports,” he added in an interview this month. “So, many countries started their own space programs to get around the export controls.”

Domestically over the years, Mr. McCain’s committee sought to spur things like Internet development, the private space industry and the commercial licensing of federally owned inventions.

But in 2002, for the first time, the nation registered negative balances of trade in advanced technology goods for a whole year. “Time to wake up,” Representative Donald Manzullo, an Illinois Republican, said as he led a hearing in July 2003 on preserving the defense industrial base.

Mr. McCain, who held no hearings on the issues, did push for new innovations. For instance, he introduced a bill in 2005 to limit heat-trapping gases that sought to spur the development of green technologies.

A few months later, the National Academies issued its influential report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm.” The academies, the nation’s most eminent scientific and engineering organization, called for an urgent effort to strengthen American competitiveness.

The report said industries like chemical, semiconductor and automotive were growing in other countries while comparable American efforts atrophied. The patent office issued most of its information technology patents to foreigners. The United States ranked 17th among industrialized nations in high-school graduation rates, and the country had become “a net importer of high-technology products,” many from China.

The report added that corporations were cutting back on basic research and eliminating in-house laboratories.

Among other things, it proposed that the government finance 10,000 scholarships for math and science teaching careers and 30,000 scholarships for college-level study of science, math and engineering; increase the basic research budget by 10 percent a year for seven years; and establish programs to make broadband available nationwide at low cost.

Representative Sherwood L. Boehlert, a New York Republican who was chairman of the House science committee, praised the report at a hearing and said, “Complacency will kill us.”

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