WASHINGTON-David Gergen, who has worked as a key figure in several White Houses under presidents ranging from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, had some less-than-optimistic words about the current and future prospects of the United States during CUNA's Governmental Affairs Conference here.
"I think all of us know we're in trouble. There are days I wake up more discouraged about where we are going as a country than I have been in my lifetime," said Gergen. "Other days I wake up and think we can make it. The problems are deep and we are having problems with a failure of leadership as a country."
Gergen reminded that while times may seem bleak, it isn't the first time the U.S. has been in similar straits. "I remember when Richard Nixon resigned office, Jerry Ford was voted out of office, and Jimmy Carter was voted out of office, and people talked about the country being ungovernable. And then along came a cowboy out of the west," said Gergen, himself a fan of Ronald Reagan's optimism.
Gergen praised credit unions for standing for thrift and discipline and helping people to stand on their own to feet. Those are traits he believes the country is going to need.
"We need to lift ourselves out of this funk," said Gergen, a frequent pundit on television. "People are pessimistic. People feel the country is in decline. I have a friend who teaches a course at Harvard called '"The Rise of the West.' Thirty years from now will we still the Rise of the West, or be called the Rise of the Rest: China, India, Japan? We ought to welcome it, if these countries are safe, stable neighbors. Is there a third choice: the rise and fall of the west? That's the issue we are increasingly facing as we deal with these chronic problems as a people and our failures to deal with it. "
Gergen praised the White House and Congress for effectively dealing with immediate crises, such as the financial meltdown. "But where we're having trouble is in responding to chronic problems that we know are building up," he reiterated. "And we keep on delaying the hard choices and pushing them into the future, and they get worse and worse and worse. It is a classic example of the frog and the boiling pot. We increasingly feel like the frog that has gotten into cool water. We are leaving something for our kids that we should not be leaving. "
Gergen believes the Obama Administration's foreign policy team and record to date are both pretty good, but again returned to the bigger problems in domestic issues. He said he believes credit unions' desire for greater business lending powers is a good idea, but added with a laugh, "I haven't had the pleasure of hearing from the community bankers on that.
Gergen suggested one misconception with the current drive to create jobs is that it "is not simply a matter of creating the jobs to fill the jobs lost in the recession. For five decades after World War II the Great American Job Machine was terrific at cranking out jobs. During the Clinton Administration alone we created 23 million jobs. But over past the 10 years we have not created the number of jobs we had since December, 1999. We have flat-lined. We have to recognize we're into something deeper now. One out of six Americans is either unemployed or underemployed. And experts say we will not be back to the 5% jobless rate before 2016. Some economists believe that the new normal is going to look like 7%. We must recognize we have not just a short-term problem but a long-term problem. And the only way to resolve it is to become a much more innovative, educated nation.
"We are not going to spend our way out of this," Gergen continued. "We're not going to borrow our way out of this. We must innovate our way out of this. The reason America became a great nation was we were the best-educated nation in the world. As the 20th century opened we had more people graduating from high school and college than anyone else. But we have flatl-ined since the 1970s and 1980s. Now we're down to around number 20 in the world in high school graduation. We need to get kids back into schools. Credit unions can be very helpful with this. We have been slow at this because our political leadership has been slow and we've let unions run over reform.
"We had 50,000 college seniors this year applying for Teach for America. And we can only take 4,000. It's harder to get into Teach for America than it is to get into Stanford. It's crazy. There is a lot of energy in this younger generation. We have the most creative nation on earth. We can compete again. We're not going to outspend China. We can out-innovate China."
As for the big issue, when Gergen mentioned tackling the budget deficit the audience applauded, but he stated again that that same audience must come to grips with the size of unfunded liabilities in the United States.
