Was putting a man-on-the-moon peculiarly un-American?

First-image of ISS docking by a soon-to-retire U.S. space shuttle

The Economist has an interesting read on the 50-year anniversary of President Kennedy's speech which set a goal of putting a man-on-the-moon within a decade.

Here's the key excerpt:

He (Kennedy) set out to make America’s achievements in space an emblem of national greatness, and the project succeeded. Yet it did not escape the notice of critics even at the time that this entailed an irony. The Apollo programme, which was summoned into being in order to demonstrate the superiority of the free-market system, succeeded by mobilising vast public resources within a centralised bureaucracy under government direction. In other words, it mimicked aspects of the very command economy it was designed to repudiate. 

That may be why subsequent efforts to transfer the same fixity of purpose to broader spheres of peacetime endeavour have fallen short. If we can send a man to the moon, people ask, why can’t we [fill in the blank]? Lyndon Johnson tried to build a “great society”, but America is better at aeronautical engineering than social engineering. Mr Obama, pointing to competition from China, invokes a new “Sputnik moment” to justify bigger public investment in technology and infrastructure. It should not be a surprise that his appeals have gone unheeded. Putting a man on the moon was a brilliant achievement. But in some ways it was peculiarly un-American—almost, you might say, an aberration born out of the unique circumstances of the cold war. It is a reason to look back with pride, but not a pointer to the future.

Barring a crisis or existential threat, are the prospects for the U.S. undertaking an ambitious, focussed transition to a sustainable energy based system, or an affordable healthcare system, extremely remote?

In short, was the U.S.'s Race to the Moon success, as The Economist puts it, a 'glorious one-off'?