Alton, at the risk of being “preachy” here is my own theory on the failure of today’s leaders (for what it’s worth and to help pass the time till DA day):

We reap what we sow. The late 40’s and 50’s were a time of unprecedented growth, comfort and privilege for the children of America. By and large they had a painless existence and their energies were devoted to examining the (boring) standards of their war-weary parents and finding much dissatisfaction with what they discerned as an overly conformal lifestyle preoccupied with the essentials of life (food, clothing, shelter and freedom), which, of course they had in abundance but lacked the value their parents put on them because, unlike their parents, they didn’t pay the price for these gifts. Therefore they were ripe for rebellion when the Vietnam war, which had questionable “Raison d’etre” and was critically examined by their college mentors, came along.

Throw the long overdue civil rights movement into the mix, stir in a little sexual “freedom” and we had the “sixties” (and early seventies), which was indeed “liberating”, but brought in many destructive elements, including rejection of our cherished national ideals and way overly critical judgments on U.S. historical behavior, with little or no historical context, both of which persist to this day. They persist because the children of the sixties and seventies are the esteemed college professors, intellectuals and political leaders of today. Many of them have failed to mature and evolve in the model of Winston Churchill, who said “if you are young and are not liberal you have no heart, if you are old and not conservative you have no head”. Many did not mature in this way because of the extreme arrogance of their youth, which resisted the injections of national common sense that came along with the “malaise” of Jimmy Carter and the inspirational leadership of Ronald Reagan. So today we are left with 51% of the country living in a fairyland where all goods are freely available to those in “need” and for whom moral relativism has eliminated the ability to discern and identify the evils in our midst. I think we’ll come back, but in the mean time, God help us.