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Comparing Obama to Swarzenegger is rediculous. Does Arnie have the college ed. that Obama has? Constitutional law knowledge?

Enough with the gloom and doom. The sky is falling. It's the end of the world. Cassandras running all around, seeing death and destruction everywhere.

A word to the fearful: get over yourselves. Take charge of your own lives and stop blaming everyone else for your imaginary ills.

Consider the 21st Century to be everything the 20th Century failed to be.

I am disappointed with Obama. I figured that a smart person would hire smart people.
I'm seeing a lot of "not smart" people. The upcoming trial in New York is going to be incredibly expensive, will prove nothing we don't already know, and may generate a terrorist strike and/or the murder of the Jurors.
I could go on, but anyone who reads the news knows that there are a lot of problems out there that the Feds are not dealing with. I had great hopes that a President that has an IQ higher than room temperature would do a lot better job than I'm seeing. He is still better than Bush, but either of my cats is smarter than he was, and they are cuter as well.

I can't listen to the above report, but I can reply to the question.

There a some things I do not agree with concerning Obama's 1st year in office. I don't like our troops over in Iraq, Pakistan and Afganistan. I don't agree with how things are being handled over there either. I didn't agree with the distribution of money to some corporations nor how the sistuation is being overseen.

So far, however, the health care problem in the US is being steadily addressed. This is no doubt because of our nation's democratic proceedures. In this respect, democracy is not completely failing. In my opinion

America is great because we the people make it great. The problems we are having today is a cycle of time (every 40 years we must clean house) all things pass. The sky is not falling chicken little (aka Friedman)
We will overcome.

Friedman ,writter for the NY Times has also written a book called The World is Flat.
intresting comments about Friedman...
General criticisms
Economist Edward Herman has complained that Friedman makes denigrating remarks about Arabs and the Arab world:
[Thomas Friedman is]...regularly denigrating Arabs for their qualities of emotionalism, unreason, and hostility to democracy and modernization. His classic remark, in the same interview in which he lauds the proxy terrorism model, was that we mustn't go too far in forcing Palestinian concessions because, "I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands." Some of Friedman's environmental critics question Friedman's support of still undeveloped "clean coal" technology and coal mining as emblematic of Friedman's less than "green" commitment to renewable energy. While Friedman supports the elimination of coal based power, he believes improving coal technology is necessary in the short term.
Canadian author Linda McQuaig devoted a chapter of her 2001 book All You Can Eat to analyzing and comparing the writing and argument styles of Friedman and Dinesh D'Souza as prominent. She expresses the opinion that they are apologists for Globalization's excesses.
Noam Chomsky has accused Friedman of bias, claiming that the columnist and his employer, The New York Times, refused to publish a word about Arafat's offer to enter into negotiations with the Israeli leadership in December 1986. Chomsky writes in his Necessary Illusions and Pirates and Emperors that Friedman was aware of Arafat's offer, but instead wrote that Israel couldn't find a negotiating partner.
In an interview on the radio program, The Young Turks, Michael Hirsh, an editor for Newsweek, criticized Friedman for not admitting his error in initially supporting the Iraq War.
Scott McClellan himself has come and out and said, "You know what, [the Iraq War] was a bad idea. This Iraq War was a misconceived strategy." And, yes, you have these very prominent gentleman, and sometimes ladies of the press who have not been able to make an equivalent mea-culpa. I think example number one has got to be Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who embraced what he called "a war of choice," which, you know, in my view is just the euphemism for a war crime. And he's never been held accountable for it.

Some critics have derided Friedman's idiosyncratic prose style, with its tendency to use mixed metaphors and analogies. In a review of "Longitudes and Attitudes", Walter Russell Mead described his prose as being "an occasionally flat Midwestern demotic punctuated by gee-whiz exclamations about just how doggone irresistible globalization is -- lacks the steely elegance of a Lippmann, the unobtrusive serviceability of a Scotty Reston or the restless fireworks of a Maureen Dowd and is best taken in small doses"
In September 2009, Friedman wrote an article praising China's one-party autocracy, saying that it was "led by a reasonably enlightened group of people." China's leaders, he reported, are "boosting gasoline prices" and "overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power." When asked if he had "China envy" during a Fresh Dialogues interview, Friedman replied, "You detect the envy of someone who wants his own government to act democratically with the same effectiveness that China can do autocratically."

from a fascinating article at view link "Obama’s visit to China last week was starkly different from previous such occasions. The United States has stumbled into a new era. Just a decade ago it all looked so different. President Bush—in one of history’s great miscalculations—believed that the world stood on the verge of a new American century. In fact, the opposite was the case. The defeat of the Soviet Union flattered only to deceive and mislead. In a world increasingly defined by the rise of the developing countries, most notably China, the United States was, in fact, in relative decline. It took the global financial crisis to begin to convince the U.S. that it could no longer take its global supremacy for granted. This dawning realization has come desperately late in the day. Even now most of the country remains in denial. Never has a great power been less prepared or equipped to face its own decline.

I think that a bit too strong and negative, but it is true that the world has changed and that we have squandered a great deal of our strength fighting wars we can't win and shipping all our jobs overseas.

First, we don't have a democracy. We have a representative republic.

Second, IMO the article Market Mama posted is basically right. NOBODY holds supremacy forever, and it's way past time for us and our government employees to realize that we meet the same people on the way down as we did on the way up. The sky isn't falling; the sun is just setting.

The setting sun is beautiful - a fishermans delight. Good comment Macaroo388