Last month, a new stretch of road opened in southeast Pennsylvania that completed a project 62 years in the making.

The Interstate Highway System.

I was seven years old when President Dwight Eisenhower launched this ambitious effort to knit together our vast country—a project he knew would continue for decades after he was gone.

Ike, like all great leaders, was thinking long-term and well beyond his tenure. It's the absence of such thinking that is the single biggest problem in Washington: No one seems to care how what they do today affects tomorrow.

The Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearing chaos was a case study in unbridled short-termism – as the tactics employed by both parties were exquisitely tailored to win the next news cycle, the next vote, the upcoming November election. Little attention was paid to the damage being done to the long-term future of the Senate, the courts or the country.

That's a problem for tomorrow.

In an interview on CBS "This Morning," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the angst and anger over the Kavanaugh hearings, saying it will "blow over." Perhaps he is right. Weeks or months from now, we'll be on to another controversy. But the short-term thinking that created this mess will remain.

Consider a gathering crisis that is getting almost no attention in this fall's midterms: Our national debt is huge, it is growing, and absolutely no one in a position of real power cares to do anything about it. Everyone frets but no one acts.