David Gergen on our toxic political culture

The U.S. Capitol
A view of the Capitol building in Washington.
Evan Vucci/ASSOCIATED PRESS

"Never have our problems been so large - and our capacity to solve them so limited." That, at least, is the opinion of one of the nation's top political analysts: David Gergen.

Gergen has had a front-row seat during plenty of tough times in Washington, serving as he did as a top advisor to four presidents, both Republican and Democrat: Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. He's now a senior political analyst for CNN and director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Gergen says all the challenges facing the nation have been accumulating over time, and, he says, we have now reached the point where dealing with those problems will require genuine sacrifice.

David Gergen was a featured guest recently at the Commonwealth Club of California, where he talked about some of the challenges that faced those former presidents he worked for and what we can learn from those experiences.