Despite all screaming to the contrary, the kind of American Exceptionalism that has defined the past century is alive and well in this country.

It just takes leadership to recognize and nurture it.

A good leader recognizes that just because he believes he’s right, doesn’t mean someone else is necessarily wrong. Leadership isn’t a contest, nor is it a zero sum game. An effective leader can find the courage to say, “Well, I’m right about this. But you’re also right about that.”

Two wrongs don’t make a right, we know, but two rights sure do make progress.

For example, listening to both sides tell it, one might think debt is some kind of crime.

But any high school economics teacher will tell you that debt, on its own, isn’t a bad thing, and that effective use of credit is an enormously powerful tool.

Debt, after all, helped us win two world wars. It helped finance unrivaled infrastructure and helped us put a man on the moon. Some of America’s – and mankind’s – greatest achievements came precisely because our global neighbors recognized the value in helping America finance worldwide progress.

On that, we hope, we can all agree.

But just because we can all agree that smart use of debt is a good thing, it doesn’t preclude the fact that abusive and injudicious use of debt can be wildly damaging, even damning.

Borrowing 40 percent of what we spend to help pay for a healthcare system that is inefficient, overly complicated and overpriced is foolish – especially when so many of our neighbors have found more creative and more effective ways to care for their own. Continuing to blindly finance a 1930s-era social safety net in the same manner as it has been done for 80 years, simply because it has always been done that way, is not only stubborn, but archaic. American progress, after all, has always been made with an eye to the future – not a refusal to let go of the past.

In this light, both sides of the debt debate are right. The time is well passed to begin living within our means again – but with the recognition that America is in the unique position of being able to use debt as a means of its own.

There are also those that would argue passionately for only one side of the public vs. private investment issue, without recognizing that both sides are at least partially right.

For all of the stunning, government-financed achievements of the past 100 years – the aforementioned infrastructure improvements, the space program, victory in the Cold War – there have been many more unheralded private successes, no less monumental. The rise of Intel, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Coca Cola, Nike and thousands of others proves that given an environment in which to thrive, private ventures can and do drive this country.

Policies which encourage competition and growth, which strive to eliminate regulatory barriers and free the entrepreneurial spirit, are essential to continued prosperity.

But this prosperity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Federal defense spending in the 1960s enabled the birth of the Internet and the digital age as we know it. Money spent in the 1980s on cutting edge molecular science helped develop the modern – and booming – life sciences industry. And today’s nominal investments in clean energy are, however slowly, helping to create an entirely new industry upon which a great deal of our future growth and security will rest.

Just as there is recognition that private industry is the pump which keeps this country’s lifeblood flowing, so one must also realize that pump must, from time to time, be primed by public investment.

If we can just stop screeching about how wrong the other side is for only one minute, we can hopefully realize how right we all can be. We’ve proven, in the past, that we can be a nation of “yes” instead of “no.”

Today, our future success depends upon our leaders’ abilities to re-learn this essential skill.