New Scientist: Reality returns to the White House

by Peter Aldhous, 27 December 2008

Barack Obama may have an impossible burden  of expectation on his shoulders, but one fervent wish of many US scientists should be easy enough to fulfil: simply lead the nation back into the "reality-based community".

That phrase, famously used by a senior adviser to George W. Bush in a 2002 conversation with the journalist Ron Suskind, epitomised the Bush administration's contempt for those who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality": that is from observation rather than ideology.

Instead, the Bush White House boasted of creating its own reality, and had little time for research that questioned its policies, leading to what some observers characterised as a "war on science". Many top scientific jobs were filled by ideologues, and empirical evidence was ignored or distorted in order to bolster policies such as inaction on global warming, a reluctance to list species as endangered, and an approach to HIV that focused on sexual abstinence.

Scientists were prominent among those cheering Obama's election victory on 4 November. A clear sign of the president-elect's new direction came two weeks later when he sent a video message to a conference on global warming in Beverly Hills, California. "The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear," Obama said. "Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high; the consequences too serious."

News review 2008: Reality returns to the White House

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