Half of the U.S. economic growth since World War II has come from advances in science and technology.

In an answer the the science questionnaire submitted to Obama and Romney by ScienceDebate.org Governor Romney said,

"Three-quarters of all U.S. economic growth, and three-quarters of the U.S. productivity advantage over other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations, is directly attributable to innovation, and wages in innovation-intensive industries have grown more than twice as fast as other wages in recent decades."
He goes on to say how his economic reforms will help free enterprise and inovation.

Obama said,
"I am committed to doubling funding for key research agencies to support scientists and entrepreneurs, so that we can preserve America's place as the world leader in innovation."
He goes on to describe his education plans to train one million additional science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates over the next decade.

They go on to answer questions on climate change, Investment in research, Biosecurity, Education, Energy, Food, the Internet, Ocean Health, Science in Public Policy, Space, Natural Resources, and Public Health.
See the answers.

"The Founding Fathers were science enthusiasts. Thomas Jefferson, a lawyer and scientist, built the primary justification for the nation's independence on the thinking of Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon and John Locke - the creators of physics, inductive reasoning and empiricism. He called them his "trinity of three greatest men." If anyone can discover the truth by using reason and science, Jefferson reasoned, then no one is naturally closer to the truth than anyone else. Consequently, those in positions of authority do not have the right to impose their beliefs on other people. "

"Several major party contenders for political office took positions that can only be described as "antiscience": against evolution, human-induced climate change, vaccines, stem cell research, and more. "

"Today's denial of inconvenient science comes from partisans on both ends of the political spectrum. Science denialism among Democrats tends to be motivated by unsupported suspicions of hidden dangers to health and the environment. Common examples include the belief that cell phones cause brain cancer (high school physics shows why this is impossible) or that vaccines cause autism (science has shown no link whatsoever).
Republican science denialism tends to be motivated by antiregulatory fervor and fundamentalist concerns over control of the reproductive cycle. Examples are the conviction that global warming is a hoax (billions of measurements show it is a fact) or that we should "teach the controversy" to schoolchildren over whether life on the planet was shaped by evolution over millions of years or an intelligent designer over thousands of years (scientists agree evolution is real).
Of these two forms of science denialism, the Republican version is more dangerous because the party has taken to attacking the validity of science itself as a basis for public policy when science disagrees with its ideology."

During the 2012 Republican primaries Otto points out that most candidates made antiscience statements which resulted in a jump in the polls. (See the article for details.)
Jon Huntsman said that "The Republican party was in danger of becoming 'the antiscience party'...for the Republican Party to win, we can't run from science."
He finished last in the polls.

Otto argues that,
In the 1960s and 1970s a philosophical movement called postmodernism developed among humanities professors displeased at being deposed by science, which they regarded as right-leaning. Postmodernism adopted ideas from cultural anthropology and relativity theory to argue that truth is relative and subject to the assumptions and prejudices of the observer.

He also says that,
"It has also infected journalism, where the phrase "there is no such thing as objectivity" is often repeated like a mantra.
  Reporters who agree with this statement will not dig to get to the truth and will tend to simply present 'both sides' of contentious issues, especially if they cannot judge the validity of scientific evidence."
See the entire article.

Links:
Creation - Evolution - Intelligent Design
American Inovation
Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy: Scientific American
ScienceDebate.org
Shawn Lawrence Otto | Neorenaissance