If you’re responsible for taking care of pre-schoolers and one decides to beat up the other and you failed to stop it, are you responsible for that?
If you’re strong enough to control the pre-schoolers, yes. If your branch of the government is co-equal with theirs, though, how do you do it?
IOW, what exactly do you mean by “handle the Republicans”?
What you’re attempting is called an analogy. Yours is flawed.
As a learning experience, try to find the flaws by yourself. We don’t want to do your homework for you, but if you give it a sincere try, and post your best effort here, we will try to help.
I doubt it.
I was a Clinton supporter at the time. Obama seemed a little too idealistic, and Clinton seemed like the kind of person who would not be hindered in getting things to work out by actually believing in anything.
Unlike most people, however, my opinion of Obama as president has only gone up. He proved to be quite rational after all (laughable attempts to paint him as a socialist notwithstanding). The entire country has been sabotaged during his presidency by people who would almost certainly have sabotaged it under Clinton to at least the same degree. Perhaps the only way any president could have defended the country would have been to wage an extremely aggressive and brilliant propaganda war, but it isn’t clear that doing so would have been in the best long term interests of the country.
That is an excellent post on FDR, Lago.
Anyway I think Obama has been a pretty good President and I doubt Hillary would have been as good let alone better.
Obama has faced two massive constraints:
a) A big recession just when he came into office which was always likely to be difficult to recover from. The aftershocks in Europe have obviously not helped a bit. There are things he could have done to speed the recovery but they were very risky in political terms: pushing for a much bigger stimulus when he got into office which would have reduced his chances of getting much else done. Secondly he could have replaced Bernanke with someone more aggressive about using monetary policy. Again very risky and perhaps not even possible. Even in hindsight I am not sure I would advocate either of these steps. Other than that there is not much else he could have done to speed up the recovery and with a sluggish economy he was always going to lose political momentum.
b) You need a super-majority to get anything through the Senate but the Republican party has been unified and intractable. There was a brief window when the Democrats had 60 votes but even then Obama needed the votes of senators like Nelson, Lieberman and Lincoln. I have never heard a persuasive answer as to how Obama was supposed to get 60 votes without making compromises.
In the circumstances I think Obama has done a remarkable job of getting things done. You probably have to go back to LBJ for a President who was as effective at passing domestic legislation. And obviously Obama has been vastly more skilfull than LBJ when it comes to national security.
How about a little hint? 
Oh, I don’t know. I found the representation of Congressional Republicans as a bunch of bullying pre-schoolers surprisingly apt.