I’ve run for office three times, losing twice, winning once. Each time, when the campaign was over, I felt that I hadn’t done an adequate job communicating all that I had intended to say. Some of that is because debate answers are limited to sixty seconds, ads are thirty seconds, and lengthy position papers are rarely read at all.

This book gives me a chance to say more than I did during my campaign. That established, my interest in writing the book goes back well before my political life. My career in the private sector exposed me to developments abroad and conditions at home that were deeply troubling.

At the same time, I saw that most of us were not aware of the consequences of blithely continuing along our current course: We have become so accustomed to the benefits of America’s greatness that we cannot imagine any significant disruption of what we have known.

I was reminded of a book I had read when I was in France during the late 1960s. Jean- Jacques Servan-Schreiber was a journalist and a businessperson, and he became convinced that France and Europe were in danger of falling far and irretrievably behind the United States.

His book, “The American Challenge,” stirred his countrymen to action and helped galvanize pan-European economic and political collaboration. While I am sufficiently realistic to recognize that this volume is highly unlikely to have as great an impact as did his, it is my hope that it will affect the thinking and perspectives of those who read it.

Thus, this is not a collection of my positions on all the important issues of the day; in fact, a number of issues I care about are not included. This is not a policy book that explores issues in greater depth than do scholars and think tanks—I treat topics in a single chapter that others have made the subject of entire volumes. Nor is this an attack piece on all the policies of the Obama administration, although criticism is unavoidable with policies that I believe are the most harmful to the future generations of America