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When JFK uttered that famous 1961 line in his inaugural address about not asking what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country, nobody rolled their eyes. Despite capturing just two-tenths of a percent more of the popular vote than Nixon, JFK understood that he had the mandate to assume a certain level of authority over other people’s lives. He also understood that deep down, people almost always like the way a real leader makes them feel: How we find ourselves working harder and pushing ourselves and thinking in ways we wouldn’t be able to if there weren’t this person around who we respected and believed in and wanted to please. In other words, he understood that a leader is someone who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

Today, it seems safe to say that we’re in pretty dire need of some solid presidential leadership. We’ve got a jigsaw puzzle of a war to solve, a flailing economy and a broken healthcare system. Our public schools are failing. And there’s a heated national debate over what’s less humane: exploiting or deporting our illegal immigrants. Then there’s the energy crisis which in many ways serves as the backdrop of our personal and professional lives, as well as the underpinning of so many of the other major issues on the presidential discussion table (i.e. the economy, the war, global warming, etc.). The bottom line numbers look like this: We Americans use over 20 million barrels of oil a day. We produce the equivalent of 8 million barrels, and are forced to import another 12 million. Since our nation’s policy is to use corn in the production of ethanol (a horribly inefficient means), we’re negatively impacting our, and the world’s, food supply, when we use this option to replace some of our imported energy. Every acre of corn for ethanol is an acre unavailable for soybeans or wheat, whose prices then also rise – a ripple effect that impacts everything from meat to milk and soft drinks. And our cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism doesn’t seem to be waning: our incessant telephoning, e-mailing and texting, long hours on the road, and steadfast devotion to the flickering tube, all show no signs of dimming.

To fill our insatiable need for energy, we’re relying on an ever more dubious cast of characters—funneling billions of dollars to countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela—that are at best unfriendly and in some cases, actively anti-American. And as China and India compete with us for these finite resources, the prices are… well, you’re living it… going through the roof. Complicating the issue is the notion that if we sit around for much longer and let the process get hijacked by vested interests, there may not be enough crude left to go around to fuel another try. Consider that even if we distilled our entire corn crop into ethanol, the fuel produced would displace less than a sixth of the gasoline we currently guzzle. The outlook for hydrogen looks even worse. In truth, any shift to alternatives or better efficiency will take years and perhaps decades to implement. The U.S. car fleet, for example, turns over at a rate of just eight percent a year. That’s as fast as consumers can afford to buy new cars and manufacturers can afford to make them. This means that between the time it would take to get manufacturers to retrain workers, and design and retool cars, and the time it would take to get consumers into an entirely green fleet, we’re looking at upwards of fifteen years. Whoa.

Our next president is obviously going to have to engage in a great feat of intellectual gymnastics, as well as serious leadership, to devise our short and long-term energy strategy, balancing the urgency and enormity of the task at hand with their own political agendas (not to mention the extraordinary pressures he’ll face from powerful interests). He’ll also have to administer some serious tough love when it comes to shocking us out of our complacency and dictating new energy habits for both American companies and consumers.

So my questions are as follows: Is addressing the energy crisis at the top of your list when you think about how to cast your ballot in November? What are the most important issues for you when it comes to this election? And which, if any, of the presidential candidates do you think possesses the intellectual horsepower and leadership ability our country needs? Finally, what individual sacrifices do you think our next president should be asking of you?

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