Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I've had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today, it's this: People want to do nation building in America.
They are not only tired of nation building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it, they sense something deeper - that we're just not that strong anymore. We're borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage.
Our president's latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. When you, the president, after September 11th, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.
We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents' generation - work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means - have given way to subprime values: "You can have the American Dream - a house - with no money down and no payments for two years"
That's why Donald Rumsfeld's defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: "You go to war with the army you have." Hey, you march into the future with the country you have - not the one you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York's Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In JFK's waiting lounge, we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed in Singapore's ultramodern airport, with free internet portals and children's play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, as if we had just flown from the Flintsones to the Jetsons.
If all Americans could compare Berlin's luxurious central train station today with the grimy decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.
How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it's because Singapore is investing billions of dollars from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world's best talent - including Americans.
And us? Harvard's president, Drew Faust, just told a Senate hearing that cutbacks in government research funds were resulting in "downsized labs, layoffs of post-docs, slipping morale and more conservative science that shies away from the big research questions." Today, she added, "China, India, Singapore...have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere."
Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is "toughening up" Barack Obama so he'll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don't need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. I'm voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV - at 8 p.m. - from the White House East Room.
Who will tell the people we are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.
I don't know if Barack Obama can lead that way, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn't matter is dead wrong. "Of course hope alone is not enough," says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, "but it's not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else."
