On Wednesday night, Mitt Romney was respectful of Barack Obama when Barack Obama challenged him. Mitt Romney looked Barack Obama in the eye when Barack Obama challenged Romney. He kept a smiling demeanor to his challenge in the room.

Wednesday night, Mitt Romney was the challenge in the room for Barack Obama and Barack Obama would not look at him. Barack Obama kept his head down, eyes fixed on his podium. This is a metaphor for the entirety of Barack Obama’s Presidency.

Mr. Obama does not make eye contact with the challenges he faces. He looks down or away.

He came into the White House to dire fiscal times. No one denies it. But Barack Obama declared a recovery in June of 2009. Instead of looking the challenge in the eyes and staring it down, Barack Obama declared it no longer a problem and pivoted to healthcare. Even as the fiscal storm raged, Barack Obama said it turned out to be worse than he and his advisors expected, but he wouldn’t make eye contact with the problem. He set about destroying our healthcare system instead in the name of reform.

In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon exploded off shore. It took the President almost two months to look the challenge in the eyes, address the nation, and tell us what he was going to do. In the meantime, his administration overreacted doing untold harm to the Gulf Coast economy. Still, the President refused to meet the challenge of our economic situation, pivoting from health care to Solyndra.

Now, we have another challenge. The Middle East is in chaos and our Ambassador is dead. The Presidential campaign went from “Osama is dead and Al Qaeda is on the run” to “Al Qaeda is alive and our Ambassador assassinated.” But the President refused to face this challenge too. Instead, he blamed a YouTube video. We now know the President and his administration knew of the security risk. We now know the President and his administration were pretty sure, within twenty-four hours of September 11th, that we had yet again been attacked by terrorists on September 11th.

But the President refused to look us or the problem in the eyes. As his Press Secretary, Secretary of State, and Defense chiefs were beginning to acknowledge it was a terrorist attack, Barack Obama still refused to make eye contact with the problem. He refused to even acknowledge it existed, hiding still behind a YouTube video.

I have reservations about Mitt Romney. I’m a conservative. Of course I do. They are well known. But make no mistake about it — Mitt Romney will make eye contact with the challenges of the day instead of looking away at a podium, a desk, or a distraction. I may not always agree with him, but at least I know I can trust him to make eye contact with the challenges of our day and set about solving them, not looking for easy distractions and fleeting glories.

Barack Obama won’t make eye contact with the challenges of the day and he won’t accept responsibility for having to deal with them. Nothing is his fault. Nothing is his blame. Only credit flows to Barack Obama. Now more people are out of the job market than any time since the Carter recession, our Ambassador to Libya is dead, and the black flag of Al Qaeda rises from our own flag poles at our own Embassies in the Middle East.

For five years the left has told us Barack Obama came off Mount Olympus to be our God-King. Now they say the elevation in Denver, lower than that of Olympus, was too high for him. The god-king of the Cult of Personality bleeds. Pay no attention to any of it. Make no eye contact with reality — not to him being merely a flawed man in over his head, not to our dead Ambassador, not to the unemployed, not to Al Qaeda’s black flag.

No, the god-King commands we pay attention to Big Bird and birth control — issues that, unlike Christopher Stevens and millions of unemployed, truly matter when staring down at the podium instead of making eye contact with the future.