Given the proclivity for President Obama to try and sell the American people on the idea that government is the fount of all goodness in life, perhaps someone will offer to show him the film, Apollo 13. With the recent death of a true American hero, Neil Armstrong, there is renewed public interest in manned spaceflight. Among all the famous quotations by Gene Kranz and the crew of Apollo 13, "Houston we have a problem" & "failure is not an option", there is one that is particularly pertinent to the role of government. You can watch it on YouTube here:

In the midst of dealing with incompatible carbon dioxide scrubbing canisters, rectangular in the Command Module (CM) and round in the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), Ed Harris as Gene Kranz says "Tell me this isn't a government operation." Please note that both modules were built by private sector aerospace contractors under contract to NASA, which bore the responsibility for integrating them together. The failure to have interchangeable canisters was NASA's alone. Good thing the contractors had included cardboard and duct tape among the consumables aboard the spacecraft!