President Barack Obama - do you feel he has helped you at all?

Well, he's in our country at this moment & we don't wanna give him back!!! Whether or not he has helped me individually I feel is kind of irrelevent. I think he has done his best, perhaps much better than the alternative could have done. I think he has helped the world quite a bit, given hope where there was only fear & depression & represented a lot of good qualities that we all know Americans have there somewhere. I'm not overly familiar with America's political system, which seems more complex than ours below the surface, but I think some of the way things turned out were a little beyond his control, though of course he was involved & took a fair bit of the blame. His handling of the financial crisis was also largely shaped by a unified tri-nations agreement to spend our way out of an inevitable depression. It seemed to be working for a while. What is a big talking point now is his plans to establish a US military base here & up the military presence to 2500 marines by 2012 as he cuts defence spending in the US. We prefer it if he helped us develop our own military. It leaves us in a very awkward position regarding China & Indonesia who are both not very happy about the situation & have lost no time in saying so. Indonesia demands a clear & detailed explaination - China is being very cryptic. If either one of them so much as frowns at us, our economy hits the wall as we've put all our eggs in the one basket. We're trying hard to keep everyone happy, but either way, it looks very bad for us. It's like walking on a razor's edge now. The good side of it is that there will be a much faster response time & much more help sooner in disaster relief for the whole region. But trying to sell such a policy to Indonesia bodes ill when they refuse all help even though scores of their own die every minute in their preventable & rescuable disasters. Maybe we should do what New Zealand did years ago & cut all defence spending to zero so anyone who wanted to take it over could just hop in whenever they felt like it!

I like President Obama as a person but as President, I have mixed views. I do not believe that he was ready for the job. He just did not have enough experience. Personally, he has not done much for me. I am 66 years old and lower income. My social security is low and we have not had a raise in two years. We are getting a small one this year but it will not keep up with the cost of living. I do not know what to think about the killing of Bin Laden. Could we have taken him alive? If so, then what? Would we have a trial? Where? It is so complicated.

If you think that as a president of United States of America, he is only responsible for the national security issue and public safety, then it is no doubt he did has an excellent handling of the problem facing the nation. But if you believe that a president has more responsibility on his plate while in office, like economy, education, health care, foreign policy, etc... then i can't be sure all of these issues are going on well presently for the country and the president deserve anymore praises than necessary other than national security. It is a tough call for most of the people since the world is a much more complex and complicated place nowadays, someone who is a president and not a tyrant can only do that much with limited political power in his hand while the rest of them are decided by congress.