It’s pretty neat when we just have a president in the US that “gets” science, and is interested in supporting science through policy or even just discussing its value in the world with a cool head.But just try and imagine a presidential candidate in the year 2012 admitting that science is the best tool humanity has in finding out what’s true about the universe. Probably not. America’s early days had some science-y politicians: Thomas Jefferson invented a clock powered by Earth’s gravity; John Quincy Adams help found the Smithsonian and boosted the patent system; Abraham Lincoln held his own patent related to getting boats unstuck from shoals and was obsessed with farming tech and sustainability; James Garfield was a published mathematician; Teddy Roosevelt forged conservation; FDR had the bomb, for better and much worse; and JFK had the Moon. Not bad, but the concentration of heavy science boosters seems to dwindle over the years.It’s hard say that the current degree of science love in US politics is much above some critical absolute zero point. Take a look at Congress’ horrorshow of a science committee for a good whiff of the state of things. Hell, the scientific positions of the Vatican make American politics look like the Flat Earth Society. Even while we’re getting some mild boost in attention now paid to global warming — just as the research news and disasters get worse — the commitment of America’s leadership to dumbness is grand. It’s royally effed that some of the more earnest pro-science things I’ve heard in mainstream or semi-mainstream politics have come from Newt Gingrich, who at least seems to have some handle on the importance of neuroscience in the future of civilization.China’s new leader is Xi Jinping, who holds a degree in organic chemistry from Tsinghua University. He follows in a tradition of sorts — his two predecessors both hold science degrees. But it’s less about the degrees themselves or their respective field than that underlying getting of science, the ability to understand data and scientific theory: how and why science says something is “true.” It has big implications for stuff like, say, global warming. China’s leading the world on renewable energy investment; in 2009 alone, China invested some $34.6 billion in green tech, about double the US. Which isn’t to say the green situation in China is anything like perfect but, here, we celebrate just a simple acknowledgement that the problem is real.So, I wonder what the limit is for science and politics in the United States in the present-day. One imagines that it’s pretty low. Science with all of its truth dealings stands against the the total truth squishiness required to run a political campaign, the requirement that data can be manipulated by ideology down to its finest points. Just imagine someone with a scientist’s commitment to reality running for national office in the US. It’d be a bloodbath.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.