What Obama has been able to accomplish in his first 100 days is enough to make any president envious

No other American president in modern memory has faced a learning curve as steep as the one that Barack Obama has encountered. When he began his quest for the Democratic nomination three years ago, the Dow Jones industrial average was 14,000, and the world was in the midst of a great economic boom. By the time he took office, America's financial industry was in chaos, credit markets were frozen, housing values were plummeting and the economy was in its worst contraction since the Great Depression. Add to that Afghanistan, Pakistan,Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and you get an extraordinary set of challenges.