From the top two candidates in the Republican race, it appears that GOP voters are looking for a few key things. They want a candidate who supports increased military interventionism, an expansion of the surveillance state, social conservative values and an individual health care mandate.
So why aren't GOP voters supporting President Barack Obama?
During his presidency, Obama has supported policies that would not set him much further apart from the current top two GOP contenders.
Although he spoke out against the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay during his campaign in 2008, he ended up signing an extension of the former and has hardly taken any steps to close the latter.
The Department of Homeland Security has only become more invasive, monitoring the Internet and beefing up airport security to extreme levels with body scanners and grandma groping.
The president also recently signed the National Defense Authorization Act, a bill some opponents argue will give the government unprecedented power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens.
And Obama has not decreased the involvement of the U.S. in foreign conflicts. While slowly drawing down our presence in Iraq, the president increased the number of troops in Afghanistan, intervened in Libya and has been performing drone operations elsewhere in the Middle East.
Does it sound like Obama should be running for the Republican nomination, too?
It gets worse.
Obama has always been against gay marriage, and usually never brings up the issue of LGBT equality. While he might have worked to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," that only affects a small percentage of the LGBT community. Meanwhile, the rest of the community is left without a voice if the contest is between Obama and Romney or Obama and Gingrich.
And if Republican voters are looking for a candidate who opposes government intervention in health care, they won't find that quality in Obama, Gingrich or Romney.
While Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he worked to pass a health care overhaul including an individual mandate, like the one in Obama's health care reform bill. And according to a new report from The Atlantic, it appears as though Gingrich expressed support for an individual mandate as recently as 2009.
Both Gingrich and Romney say they do not support this sort of government intervention on a national level, but if these candidates are willing to go against "free-market" principles in the past, what makes anyone think they will not do it again on another issue?
So, really, when looking at the three top candidates for the presidency, what's the difference?
