Why America's Still Great

Daniel Henninger: The Hubble: Real Men at Work

The news inundates us now with daily battle reports from the low-grade war that is America's politics. One cost is a national preoccupation with failure.

Politics always and forever is about the failure of others. President Obama appears before us daily, and that ensures we will hear again about "the failed policies of the past." The laws of political physics then require that his opponents crack back at his manifest failures. To spend all one's time with politics is to marinate in failure.

It becomes easy to forget that most people go to work each day to succeed, not fail. Still, it was startling last week to catch sight on TV of men floating in space. This was Servicing Mission 4, NASA's long-scheduled flight to fix the space-based Hubble telescope.

It was pure success.