Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney pauses during a campaign stop at Worthington Industries, a metal processing company, in Worthington, Ohio, Thursday. (AP)

The Daily Campus Editorial Board recommends Gov. Mitt Romney for president. The primary issue of the campaign is the economy, largely because President Barack Obama has failed to fix the mess he’d inherited.

The economic situation four years ago was terrible, but the so-called recovery of the last four years has been mediocre at best. President Obama, for all the well-deserved hype he received after his historic election in 2008, has failed to live up to the excitement.

He has not cut the deficit in half as promised – he didn’t even come close. Deficits have been upward of $1 trillion every year he’s been in office, and show no sign of improvement in the near future. The economy hasn’t recovered to nearly the degree it needs to, and the labor force participation rate is at a 30 year low.

The post-partisan hopes of the 2008 election have not been realized, as we see stubborn gridlock in congress and a focus on negative campaigning, not on a plan for the future.

Romney does have a plan for the future and has given a run a generally positive campaign in comparison to Obama. His business experience colors his view of government’s role in the economy and would be a welcome change to the stagnation we’ve seen the last several years.

Romney’s pick of Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan also signals that he has clear policy goals and is interested in solving some of the long-term issues that we have as a country. Obama has shown little interest in leading on these issues, and we desperately need someone who will.

We do have several serious problems with Mitt Romney, particularly his backwards view on gay rights, and a reckless and unrealistic foreign policy and immigration policy. We believe that these issues have to take a backseat to the economy this year.

We don’t see these issues as focuses of Romney either, or central to his message. Romney appears at his core to be a man who cares almost exclusively about the economy, and the level of focus that he’ll have on this issue alone is one of the main reasons we can support him.

It seems unlikely to us that Romney will get politically distracted from the economy, and thats very valuable when the it remains in such dire straits even five years after the decline started.

President Obama and his allies would argue that the economy left to him by former president George W. Bush was so bad that no one could have fixed it in four years, but this seems unrealistic. During a time when he enjoyed large majorities in the House and Senate, he didn’t focus on getting the economy back on track, but instead wasted his time on an unpopular healthcare law and banking reforms.

His only effort at fixing the economy was in his first month as president, but the stimulus could not have been more of a failure. It wasn’t supposed to let unemployment get above 8 percent, but until this month, it had not been able to get below 8 percent.

We don’t pretend to think that Romney will definitely be able to fix the economy, or that recovery will be quick upon his inauguration. But what we can be sure of is that he will try, and he will try hard. This is the central issue of the campaign, and for this reason we feel Romney is the best choice for president this November.