Mitt may be the only one that can accomplish this task. No one else comes to mind.
'Post-Industrial' America Needs Can-Do Leader By VICTOR <http://www.ibdeditorials.com/AuthorProfile.aspx?id=255650637395649> DAVIS HANSON | Posted Monday, July 21, 2008 4:30 PM PT In the last 20 years, we were lectured constantly about "post industrial" America. The U.S. had evolved into an "information society" of "high tech jobs." Traditional sources of strength - manufacturing, the production of food and fuel, and the assembling of cars and trucks - were passe. Instead, others less fortunate abroad were to do those grubby tasks, while Americans, with their BlackBerrys and laptops, funded, organized, lectured and critiqued them. Illegal aliens might cook our meals or change our children's diapers to free us up for far more important tasks of litigation, finance and environmental review. Chinese would make everything from our shoes to our phones. Japanese would supply us with quality high-end goods like cars and cameras. Africans, Arabs, Iranians, Russians and Venezuelans would drill oil in nasty, dirty places so we wouldn't have to. Even our food - which would be always in season - would increasingly be shipped in from Mexico and South America. Refined Americans became more concerned over questions of gender, race and class justice in our universities and courtrooms, as if the chief problem were only dividing the American pie equitably, rather than expanding it. The real source of American wealth apparently was the mere fact that we were Americans. Therefore, the rest of the world should naturally loan us money to sustain our envied lifestyle. Our homes got bigger, and we bought and sold them more as investments than as places to raise our families. Our graduates opted for Wall Street, insurance, law, journalism and academia. Why not, when laws made it more conducive to invest and trade, but harder and less lucrative to build, drill, farm and manufacture? Our universities bragged they were teaching the world how to design and engineer - as our own kids gravitated to law and management schools. We relied on a paternalistic government to regulate what we shouldn't do rather than turn to our best and brightest to show us what we could. Alas, no successful civilization in history - Greece, Rome, England, France, the list goes on - ever found prosperity through its bureaucrats and lawyers. The result of all this growing American laxity and condescension is mixed. The good news, aside from the fact we've never had it so good, is that millions in China are no longer starving. Japan talks of marketing hybrid cars, not re-establishing its old Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Persian Gulf looks more like Las Vegas than the badlands of Waziristan. Billions in the new globalized world are emulating the American middle class, which, for all the caricatures, still represents freedom and affluence. The downside is a growing collective panic at home over whether such progress is sustainable when the U.S. is up to its neck in debt, dependent on foreign energy and plagued by self-doubt and inaction. Our 21st-century paralysis is surprising. The U.S. is not materially exhausted. We sit atop trillions of dollars worth of oil, gas, coal, shale and tar sands. We could mine more uranium and reprocess fuels to build hundreds of nuclear plants. Our agriculture is blessed with the best soils, most developed irrigation systems and most productive and astute farmers. There is as much sun and wind in the West as anywhere in the world. We have plenty of natural resources and the know-how to make all the wood, steel and cement products we need. A new, hungrier generation of Americans will have to want to reclaim our pre-eminence and change the national attitude. It must be ready to pay off generations of debt rather than borrow; build rather than sue; drill rather than whine. It's time to honor rather than avoid and outsource physical labor. Our children are healthy enough to cut our own lawns and pick our fruit. Let's also hope they want to hear more about Gen. David Petraeus' success and less of Madonna's psychodramas. Just as important, what Americans need now is leadership to get moving - rather than more platitudes about hope, squabbling about race and gender, and endless rhetoric about who is really a maverick or a true conservative or the most liberal. What we need to know from our candidates are specifics about how to jump-start America. How many more barrels of oil, refineries and megawatts will America produce - and when and how? How much debt will the next administration retire - and when and how. How and when will our schools return to knowledge-based rather than the present (and failing) therapeutic curriculum? Americans, in short, should be tired of hearing that we are a post-industrial, postmodern, post-anything society. Instead, we want to be known again as a can-do producer nation that sweats as much as it thinks. And the confident presidential candidate who can best assure us of that will surely win this election. C 2008 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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