WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By Mort Zuckerman, US News) July 10, 2012 ― What happened to the American Century? I mean, what happened to that faith in the nation's high purpose and sense of direction that animated successive generations of Americans? They surfed the good times, endured the bad times. And these Americans clung to their values and their optimism through the long Depression and wars hot and cold. Never a doubt that the American can-do spirit would prevail.

America was a country that cared much more about individuals being able to move up the socioeconomic ladder than where anybody started out or stood on it.

How much dimmer are the outside views of America today and how deflated Americans themselves feel! Much of the public dialogue is about decline and recession and the dysfunctions of the political processes at all levels.

We know that with 79 million baby boomers now beginning to retire, our fiscal future is as dire as our fiscal present. Our situation brings to mind a character in an Ernest Hemingway novel who was asked, "How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways," he answered, "gradually and then suddenly." We know that given the way we are going, sooner or later the confidence of investors in America will be eroded to the breaking point and the bond and other global financial markets will force an adjustment "first gradually and then suddenly." Putting us on a path where our national economy and government revenues will be growing faster than the debts we owe is not austerity, it is sanity and leadership. And leadership is what we lack.

We have been wading deeper into it for a decade.

Which makes it all the more baffling that the Obama administration has abandoned confidence-building and instead has engaged in demeaning and discrediting the private sector. We now have a president who spends more of his time campaigning than governing, as if his government is not part of the problem. People feel there is a vacuum. He has begun his re-election campaign by stirring up the emotions of fear, envy, and resentment, invoking a class warfare that threatens us all. How far we have come from the rhetoric of hope.

More than two thirds see the past decade as a period of decline. A country long celebrated for optimism amid adversity is having trouble finding the spirit that saw it through times that were, in fact, much more menacing.

There is much about America that ought to cheer us. The United States remains the world's largest economy. It is still the global leader in the volume of manufactured goods; it is still the world's technological leader and the largest market for information technology; it is still the world's most innovative economy and home to 80 percent of the world's top universities and the top destination for foreign scholars, drawing many of the world's best and brightest to our universities and labs.

We need all the brains we can attract. We have lost our lead in large-scale, high-tech manufacturing and watched almost helplessly as uncontrolled outsourcing to Asia over two decades has hollowed out much of America's base of suppliers, factory managers, and skilled technicians. This is reflected in the dramatic turnaround in trade in high-tech products, which has gone from a $29 billion surplus in 2000 to a $50 billion plus trade deficit these days. We cannot be unaware of the shift to a service economy that privileges the better educated, which means that schools are the primary policy instrument for enhancing both social mobility and our competitive position. We cannot be unaware that we must improve our stock of human capital, that the ZIP code you are born into shouldn't determine your destiny, as it all too often does. We must never lose sight of the fact that education is more closely correlated with upward mobility than anything else and is the best solution to reducing excessive inequality that risks relegating our society into a class system.

The public instinctively understands that something is deeply wrong, that liberals refuse to acknowledge that we must live within our means and that government can be part of the problem. Capitalism, after all, has been at the center of our prosperity and economic growth.

The American public is looking for a renewal and a leadership that will eschew the emotional slogans of the extremes, the ideologies of left and right long alien to American life. The president we need should be unafraid to get booed, willing to risk a dip in the polls, eager even to wrestle with issues like immigration and public welfare.

Winston Churchill said it best: "The Americans will always do the right thing … after they've exhausted all the alternatives."

Well, they've been exhausted.