We didn’t have a choice on who to vote for last November. We were only given one candidate, Barack Romney, who won almost 100% of the vote. Not surprisingly, roughly half of the voting public in my generation sat out, because while we didn’t support Barack Romney’s candidacy, we didn’t feel like the vote for an alternative candidate would have mattered.

Whenever I criticize President Obama around my friends who are hyper-partisan Democrats, they usually retort with, “Imagine if Romney was elected!” So let’s imagine the worst scenarios.

Had Mitt Romney won on November 6, he would’ve picked a Secretary of the Interior who came straight from the oil and gas industry. Strangely enough, Sally Jewell, Obama’s pick to head up the agency in charge of managing key public natural resources, fits that bill completely. Senator Lamar Alexander commented that she “sounds like someone a Republican president would appoint.” Here’s the most revealing part of the hearing:

Alexander: “Looking at your resume, I see that you have worked on the Alaska pipeline, that you are an oil-and-gas engineer, you said you had actually fracked a gas well?” Jewell: “I have.” Alexander: “You were a banker for 19 years?” Jewell: “Yes sir.” Alexander: “You are chief executive officer of a billion-dollar company?” Jewell: “Yes sir.”

Obama’s biggest fans contend that a Mitt Romney presidency would’ve been a disaster for the environment, yet this president has shown his contempt for environmentalists through his devotion to the oil and gas industry. The state department’s environmental report for Keystone XL, which claimed that Transcanada’s proposed 2,200-mile oil pipeline would have no real impact on the climate, was actually written by a contractor on Transcanada’s payroll. From a Grist report:

“Environmental Resources Management (ERM) was paid an undisclosed amount under contract to TransCanada to write the statement, which is now an official government document. The statement estimates, and then dismisses, the pipeline’s massive carbon footprint and other environmental impacts, because, it asserts, the mining and burning of the tar sands is unstoppable.”

While liberals feared that a Romney administration would walk all over democracy and human rights, Barack Obama has shown through his pick for CIA director that civil rights come second to the “War on Terror.” Newly-minted CIA director John Brennan actually made the case while in grad school that the state has the right to crush free assembly and free press in order to preserve democracy.

He wrote the paper when he was 25 years old and studying in Egypt while Anwar Sadat was president. Sadat was called “dear brother” by the Shah of Iran, whom the U.S. had assisted in unseating a democratically-elected government in the oil-rich country. Brennan remarked on Sadat’s brutal treatment of political dissidents in Egypt whom had taken to the streets in protest of high food prices:

“Looking at the present policies of the Sadat administration, one gets the impression that democracy does not exist in Egypt. But if democracy is a process rather than a state, the democratic process may involve, at some point, the violation of personal liberties and procedural justice.”

To give the situation a full, chilling context, Brennan was the architect of Obama’s drone assassination policy, where alleged terrorists, sometimes even U.S. citizens, are placed on a kill list and executed by remote control, without due process. This is the same administration whose FBI investigated the Occupy Wall Street movement as a domestic terrorist threat.

It’s also the same president that signed into law a defense authorization bill that deems U.S. soil to be part of “the battlefield” in the “War on Terror.” Putting two and two together, it’s easy to see how Rand Paul’s fears of drone strikes being used on Americans on U.S. soil without due process could be realized. It was only after Paul’s filibuster that Attorney General Eric Holder backtracked on his earlier statement that the U.S. had the authority to do exactly that, which should sound plenty of alarms.

Even though diehard Obama supporters allege Romney would have been soft on Wall Street, Holder recently stated that the big banks were too big to prosecute. The Holder DOJ laid an egg when HSBC was found to have laundered money for terrorist organizations and drug cartels, and when big banks rigged the LIBOR interest rate, not to mention when big banks sold mortgage-backed securities to big investors like state pension funds, bet on them to fail, and then made billions from the resulting crisis. While Obama is expected to pick Deval Patrick or Charlie Crist to head up the DOJ in his second term, it’s clear he doesn’t plan on going after the bankers that helped fund his campaign.

One of the biggest fears propagated by the Democratic Party was that a Romney administration would be disastrous for the economy, particularly with Paul Ryan as vice president implementing an agenda of further austerity and inequality. However, those fears have already been realized, as Obama is taking the advice of billionaire Pete Peterson, whose chief goal is to raid social security to “fix the debt” while keeping bank bailouts, bonuses and tax loopholes intact.

This president has already told fellow Democrats to accept cuts to “entitlements,” yet refused to talk about closing the overseas tax loopholes that allowed corporations to offshore up to $150 billion last year, or to implement a small 1% Wall Street sales tax that could raise over $1 trillion in a decade.

He’s presided over a period where more wealth has concentrated into the hands of the wealthy elite than ever before, and wages for the average worker are at a record low. Even his proposal for a $9 an hour minimum wage falls fall short of where it really should be. Sen. Elizabeth Warren maintains that if the minimum wage were to keep up with productivity growth, it would be roughly $22 an hour today. FDR’s New Deal turned 80 recently, though Roosevelt is likely rolling in his grave knowing that a Democratic president is now actively seeking to gut those programs in order to preserve goodies for billion-dollar corporations.

Yes, we re-elected Barack Obama. But if Romney had prevailed last November, would things really be that much worse than they already are? In 2016, will we let the Democratic Party’s relentless fearmongering scare us once more into voting for a lesser-of-two-evils Democrat friendly to the banks and the fossil fuel industry, or will American voters finally wise up and reject the two party duopoly that’s holding our country back?