An American outlook

Saturday, Feb. 20, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

There is no doubt that Americans have a bleak outlook about current affairs. Poll after poll show dour views on the economy, terrorism, the way government is handling things and nearly everything else.

A USA Today/Gallup Poll survey recently showed that most Americans say the country is going the wrong way. Yet that poll, along with findings in the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, shows something else: Americans are optimistic about the future.

Despite the difficult times, Americans see better days ahead. According to the Gallup Poll, Americans’ view of their lives is better now than it was a year ago, and more than half of the people surveyed said they are doing well. Americans have a fairly rosy view of where the country will be in five years. Asked to rank the country on a scale of zero to 10, Americans think the country will be a seven in 2015.

For example, James Hanan, a 73-year-old disabled Vietnam veteran in Delaware, told the newspaper that this is the toughest job market in his lifetime. His grown daughter struggles with cutbacks at her job, with hours going up and down depending on the week. Yet Hanan told pollsters things will improve.

“It’s going to get better,” he said. Hanan was surprised when he was asked why. “It’s the American way, I guess.”

There is an optimism in the American character that is based on a history of the country pulling itself up by its proverbial bootstraps and pushing ahead through any challenges.

“There is kind of a default-setting worldview among Americans, and there has been for some time, that depends on the importance of positive thinking, of confidence, of belief in one’s own abilities,” Rutgers University historian Jackson Lears said. “It’s almost un-American not to be optimistic.”

That optimism took a hit recently because of the recession. It has been tarnished by the purveyors of doom-and-gloom, who glee in the sour economy and their apocalyptic predictions that the country is quickly headed to the netherworld.

Unfortunately, there are some people — particularly in politics — whose optimism rests in the belief they can use the negative news to tear down people carrying a positive vision to advance their own agendas. Remember Sarah Palin getting laughs at the Tea Party convention by asking, “How’s that hopey, changey stuff workin’ out for ya’?”

Well, it’s a lot better than the negativity pushed by the modern conservatives, who seem to be encouraging the revolutionary rumblings of the fringe on the right. How far they have come from the days of Ronald Reagan, the former president and conservative icon, who once said he wanted to be remembered as a man who “appealed to your greatest hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts.”

Americans’ hopes are based on the well-founded belief that the country can, once again, rebound. The country needs more leaders who can support and encourage such a vision instead of deride it.