'This Week' Extra: The Roundtable's Pre-Show Thoughts

NEW YORK, July 7, 2012— -- intro: Before "This Week" Sunday, we asked our roundtable participants to tell us what they are looking forward to discussing. Here are their pre-show thoughts.

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quicklist: title: Mort Zuckerman: What Happened to the American Century?

text: 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.