On April 10, Rick Santorum officially suspended his bid for the Republican nomination for the presidency. Hats off to him for carrying the conservative torch without apology, and for his unyielding defense of life and decency.  However, now that he’s out, making Mitt Romney the de facto Republican nominee, it’s time to shift from juxtaposing one Republican with another and do the real work: which is shining a light on the dismal presidential record of Barack Obama.  I do not think I go too far by calling his presidency a failure to date, and by reminding my fellow conservatives that Obama would rather run in 2012 as if he has no baggage for us to inspect. But such is not the case.

For starters, remember Obama’s stimulus package? Passed in 2009 under the name “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” Obama promised us that without its passage unemployment would rise dramatically and the deficit would expand. Well, here we are in 2012 and unemployment since the passage of the stimulus package has been as high as 10%-plus and at it’s lowest has been a staggering 8.2%, which is where it sits right now. The package itself cost tax-payers $800 billion, and even The New Yorker notes that most Americans recognize that it either “did nothing to help…the economy” or may have “actively hurt the economy.” (One thing it did for sure was to put us $800 billion further in the hole.)

Then there’s the Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare): the bill which Obama sycophant Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) helped push through the House with the promise that House members would find out what was in it once it passed. What we know now is that Obama’s promises about the cost for Obamacare were as far off base as Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity repeatedly said they were.  In fact, a newly released study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University finds that Obamacare “both increases a federal commitment to health care spending that was already unsustainable under prior law and [exacerbates] projected federal deficits relative to prior law.”

The study continues: “As currently written, [Obamacare] should be expected to increase federal spending obligations by more than $1.15 trillion over the upcoming decade and to worsen cumulative federal deficits by somewhere between $340 and $530 billion over the same period.” (In other words, if you think our current deficit of $15 trillion-plus is bad, just wait till you see how bad things get if Obamacare takes effect.)

Lastly, how about those Obama gas prices? Think of it–the same president who brought us an $800 billion stimulus package that didn’t stimulate, and who’s trying to enact a government takeover of our healthcare system that will spiral our national debt even further out of control, has also overseen a 100% increase in per-gallon gasoline prices during the last three years.

As I’ve written in other posts, these are Obama’s gas prices. They are the result of decisions he’s made, like the one he made in January when he nixed the Keystone Pipeline. Because of this, USNews has pointed out that “Obama has seen an even higher gas price increase than Carter dealt with under his administration.”

Folks, there is no reason to be afraid of Barack Obama. The rest of his record is as bad as the three aspects highlighted above. It’s not 2008 anymore. It’s 2012, and Obama only has failure to show for it.