Well besides waiting and seeing you can always lobby those potential candidates yourself and try to sell the benefits. I figure the potential is there from both parties to sell NASA short from time to time.

In many ways, the pols aren't necessarily the guilty ones in the end. It's the apathetic public. If there's strong enough voter outcry for any program from the voters, Congress and the President are going to be behind it. The NASA budget is really just a tiny slice of the overall pie and nobody's going to truly lose sleep over it.

NASA has some major responsibility in all of this too. Missions do have to have their major objective be science but the engineers and planners need to always throw in a "wow" factor and when those occur, there needs to be a major marketing ploy to push those images out to the public. They do outreach well at times but other times it seems pitiful. Now whether that's due to the media showing no interest or NASA playing nerd better than they play advertiser is the question.

Art