This country needs a leader in the worst way.

We’re currently in the midst of a confidence-free fall in every aspect of American life. It’s starting to feel like that old gag in the Looney Tunes cartoons when someone is driving the car along and they get distracted to do something else and suddenly everyone realizes no one is driving.

The comedic pay-off is usually how the vehicle makes it’s way through some chaos to be saved in the nick of time. The country has no one behind the wheel and the chaos isn’t funny.

The recent credit downgrade is just the latest in a string of bad news that Americans have been dealing with since the financial crisis really exploded back in 2008. Before that it was the world gone crazy after the attacks on September 11th.

Each one of these historic events took another chunk out of the national self-esteem that has seen so many generations of Americans through tough times.

The people of this country need someone to rally their spirits and it doesn’t seem that anyone in government has the ability to do it.

President Obama tried Monday when he addressed the S&P downgrade of America’s credit. He said:

"Markets will rise and fall, but this is the United States of America. No matter what some agency may say, we've always been and always will be a AAA country,"

It reminds me of when I was a kid and I played horribly in a soccer game and my mother would tell me what a great job I did. She was trying to focus on the positive. I knew I sucked and I knew she knew it too.

That’s what the President and other politicians need to understand. Saying that we’re a AAA country doesn’t make it true and doesn’t make people believe it.

Saying that we’re headed toward a financial recovery sure as hell doesn’t make it true and obviously no one believes it.

Saying that we’re cutting a trillion dollars in spending when we’re not doesn’t make it true and most people know it.

Real leadership, in a nation like ours, needs to be able to show people the way to achieve something and have concrete evidence of that achievement.

Stop making speeches about whats going to magically appear and instead draw us a roadmap. Draw us a roadmap and tell us you’re going to get us there.

It seems like there was a time in our nation’s history when we were led by men like that. People who showed us the way, rather than just telling us what it’s going to be like when we get there.

One type of man helped make us the greatest nation in the world, the other will watch it become something else.