This is a little too angry to be constructive.

Not really, it's a fairly realistic assessment of our current situation. We live in an amazingly wealthy country in which children go to bed hungry every night, people die every day due to a lack of basic health-care, in which the K-12 educational system fails at least 20% of the children, which has a monthly trade deficit that runs in the tens of billions.

The list of problems that this country has is nearly as long as my arm, most of them could be resolved or mitigated pretty easily, but to do that would require some good will on the part of everyone and some shared sacrifices. One of the political parties (the center right) is willing to attempt to resolve some of our problems, the other(the far right) will do everything in it's power to prevent the other from resolving any of our problems, so we will muddle along until the country breaks apart.

Oh, if only the world were that full of promise. I used to dream of the same thing, but I no longer see a path to it. We have little choice but to fix the two main parties we have, both with far too many warts and blisters. It's a long road, but I'm not willing to stop walking just yet. For now, the best we may be able to do is the best we did in the late 90's and other similar times before… make the parties split power between the executive and the majority in the legislative and force them to at least try to work together.v

Ignorant of history, Americans really need concrete and timely examples of complete failure – Marc Pascal

Sad but true. We repeat too many mistakes and until we feel the pain as individuals we often don't bother to educate ourselves or become involved. As for “intelligence” being involved, I agree there are more important things then intelligence; a few examples would be: honesty, morality, empathy, and the ability to know when you are being taken for a fool.

As for 2012, if Americans reach that point with less than enough enthusiasm to re-elect Obama, then my hope would be they would at least show enough smarts not to re-elect anyone from the GOP either, but choose a third party candidate instead.

Yes we are imperfect and yes we tend to repeat some of the same mistakes. But that doesn't go on forever or we wouldn't have made it this far. Humans have a way of flipping the script at the right time to cause a needed and real change. And I don't think the Office of Presidency is where it comes from. It comes from the ground. Yes the average American may be rough around the edges when it comes to policy (we average folks got lives to live and families to raise) but we all FEEL. And things just don't FEEL RIGHT. And that is real, Marc. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.