Legendary film maker George Lucas played political hopscotch this...

President Cheney’s weekend shooting accident. Lucas is a vocal crusader for maintaining American innovation and competitiveness and securing more investments for high-tech training for young people. That’s a bandwagon lawmakers from both parties have jumped on in 2006. The Academy Award-winner is an advocate for free public higher education, saying it would “bring us hope and hope is what brings us innovation,” Lucas said. When the film maker graduated from college, someone told him “we've screwed up the world; now we're turning it over to you,” he said: “Now I can say, ‘We tried. We screwed it up, too, and it’s up to you.'” But the next generation of innovators start on “very fertile ground to make enormous changes,” Lucas told the audience, which included about 100 college students. That shift is going to require hard work, new technologies and outside-the-box thinking, Lucas said. “The system itself is going to show its age and its disregard for common sense and the basic needs of people,” he told the group: “It’s going to be up to you to figure out how you can solve those problems -- with actions, not with words.” The Bush Administration and congressional Democrats have offered plenty of words and goals in recent months. Bush laid out his new competitiveness initiative during his State of the Union (WID Feb 2 p4) and the Democrats have been parading their innovation agenda since late last year (WID Nov 16 p2). The difference, according to Lucas’s observations, is that the Administration is focusing on long-term objectives while House Minority Leader Pelosi (D-Cal.) and her caucus are fixed on achieving short-term successes. Lucas said Republicans and Democrats “should get together and work things out” since they all appear in accord on innovation. “They seem to agree that this a very, very serious problem for our country. It needs to be addressed and it would be great if someone did something about it.”