President Obama is a failure as a president, and Gov. Romney is a failure as a candidate.

When he took office, Obama told the press that if he couldn’t cure the economic mess he inherited from President George W. Bush in four years, he wouldn’t deserve a second term. I guess he didn’t anticipate making the mess worse.

When he took office, the federal government owed $11 trillion to its creditors; today it owes $16 trillion. When he took office, gasoline was running about $1.85 a gallon and today costs about $3.85 a gallon. This is price inflation that he directly caused by flooding the markets with cash, and that directly harms the middle class and the poor. Unemployment has remained north of 8 percent throughout his presidency for those still looking for a job, and about 16 percent if you count all able-bodied out-of-work adults, half of whom have stopped looking for work on his watch.

He supported radical fanatics in their takeovers of the governments of Libya and Egypt, even going so far as to help them kill Col. Gadhafi, the former Libyan strongman who was once our ally. In the process, they opened jails in Libya, and out came some of the same folks the U.S. government has been fighting against in the Middle East since 2001. Obama pushed from power Hosni Mubarak, the strongman in Cairo, and he was replaced by the head of a criminal organization that Obama’s own State Department has prohibited Americans from engaging with. (Query: If the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, how can the government help a foreign group and at the same time prohibit Americans from doing the same?)

In his lust to build a new world order in the Middle East, a goal for which he roundly criticized President George W. Bush, Obama has unilaterally, unconstitutionally and unlawfully killed Americans there. He killed Osama bin Laden when he could have captured him, and he let a mob kill our ambassador to Libya when he could have protected him—all to justify a value-free foreign policy that has no lasting friends or enemies, just fleeting interests. And he has killed thousands in foreign lands in secret, using drones that will soon find their way here and come back to haunt him.