Is the Presidency Too Much for One Person to Handle?

Newsweek recently printed a piece questioning whether the job of President of the United States is too big and complex for one person to manage. Online comments to the article are often hateful, racially-charged, or involve 7th grade name calling.
Fawning over Obama never truly helped him. Even Hillary Clinton underestimated the importance of early success in caucuses and the momentum that got him nominated. Using GW Bush as a foil instead of focusing on McCain was helpful in the general election but serves little purpose once the reigns were in Obama's hands. It is his to clean up. You can blame others once or twice. Then you have to govern. All Presidents start off with the baggage left behind. Surely, President Obama and his staff knew that. The question is what they do with problems created by the old Administration or new problems. The economic crisis was not of Obama's making, nor were foreign policy and military blunders. GW Bush, with little or no help from John McCain and support from then-candidate or President-elect Obama, set up our initial response to the economic/credit crisis. We all have a right to expect a statute of limitations on blaming prior administrations for every failure of the current one. Otherwise, the message is of blame, not hope. If that's what some Democrats are doing, voters will surely sense it and vote accordingly. If Republicans attempt to take advantage of big issues that are unresolvable in one term, they run the same risk in the next election cycle. People who vote regularly tend to be older and have the sophistication to understand the difference. I do not believe the modern presidency is too overwhelming for one President. The roots of Obama's problems are aloofness, lack of visibility and the huge risk he took in pushing his agenda almost solely based on the votes of Democrats. We won't know if it paid off until the spring of 2012. We won't know what issues will be the biggest or whether Obama will deserve credit for steering the country for 3+ years or will have confidence in giving him a second term.
Name-calling in the meantime will not fix anything. Americans voters are often impatient people, including me. Bill Clinton was written off in 1994 but was handily reelected in 1996. Ronald Reagan was written off in 1983 but overwhelmingly won another term the next year. To me, the two big priorities right now are taking rational steps to increase job creation and stablilize the economy and to either make important strides toward or actually resolving Middle East issues. The Presidency is certainly an exhausting, frustrating job but I do not believe Barack Obama is unable to handle it. What troubles me more than that portion of the debate is trashing politicians on the basis of where they went to school.
Most Presidents in modern times, with the exception of Reagan and Johnson, either had a West Point or Ivy-League education. Obama and Clinton lacked wealth but went to elite universities because they were innately smart. I thought that was what we wanted: a nation that rewarded boot-strappers. GW Bush has an MBA from Harvard and did his undergraduate work at Yale. Many people have concluded that the younger Bush was Ivy League because his father intervened to make it happen. I have no idea whether that is true or not but it doesn't matter at this point, if it ever did. If you voted for GW Bush and think he did a good job, you can't say Obama is an elitist or broadbrush every politician as out of touch because they went to an elite college or university. There is nothing dishonorable about attending less prestigious schools, nor do Ivy League graduates have a lock on intellect and problem-solving skills.
Even Sarah Palin - on the six or seven year plan after hopscotching through a number of second or third tier schools - should not be cut out of the political process because she didn't go to Harvard. The problem is not the school(s). The problem is the lack of lifelong curiosity and the inability to admit when you lack knowledge on a subject but refuse to consider new ideas and change your mind without licking a finger and sticking it up in the air to determine which way the political wind is blowing.
There is some history to suggest that some politicians actually can change their minds. Robert Kennedy comes to mind. He didn't seem to have much of a problem with our country's involvement in Vietnam until the middle and late 1960s. Cynics may say he changed his mind to have a viable opportunity to be elected President or because he hated Johnson. I sincerely doubt those were the main reasons he shifted to the left. Yes, Lyndon Johnson's handling of the war was about has ham-handed as it could be but Kennedy knew there remained a huge conservative consituency that would make his run very difficult, especially considering that his brother had escalated the war before Johnson was sworn in in 1963. They were all Cold Warriors back then and continued to believe there would be a domino effect if they did nothing. RFK was in on almost every major decision his brother made. Had he lived to debate Nixon, you can bet Nixon would have attempted to shred him for being a hypocrite. He might have got a lot of traction out of it. Sadly, we'll never know for sure but that isn't the point. The point is that smart people, from whatever alma mater, can listen, learn, grow and change. Don't forget that Hillary Clinton had been a Goldwater Girl before she entered Wellesley in 1965 and by the time she was finished with law school at Yale she was assisting the Senate in the effort to expose Watergate and impeach Nixon. If that is not change, I don't know what is.