I grew up in the late 80’s and 90’s watching a lot of television.I can’t even name all the kid and teenager shows I watched, but many of them had to do with schools and growing up.One thing that I remember is in every show that involved a school there would always be an election episode at some point.In this episode the less popular kid who wants real change would try to run for school president against the popular kid and learn a lesson about elections and politics.The storyline is universal, the popular kid would use their popularity and false promises to gain votes, and honesty was no match for this weapon at first.One popular example would be the kid promising to get rid of homework for everyone or get them days of school.Even though the kids should have known this was impossible and unrealistic, they would cheer these false promises anyways. Our current president reminds me of those shows.

There are literally dozens of broken promises and huge reversals I can point to when it comes to Obama, but today I remember a few of the most glaring and clearly fictitious ones.First, when Obama promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.That’s right. The biggest deficit spender in history promised to cut the deficit in half.Does anyone actually think he believed that at the time? Of course not, but he knew it is what the audience wanted to hear.Another example stems from the ridiculously partisan and factually inaccurate speech last night pretending to propose a serious budget, while attacking Paul Ryan’s actual serious budget (The WSJ did a great job responding to that speech here).In January 2010, Obama said that we shouldn’t characterize the other party as “irresponsible” or “trying to hurt our senior citizens” for coming up with ideas on entitlements, and then spent his whole speech last night doing just that.This is just like the popular kid making up false rumors about his opposition when he thinks he might be losing, further showing that he really is the campaigner and chief.These hypocrisies and reversals are just a few out of many of Obama’s “judge me by my words and not my actions” attitude (another good example is the debt limit vote). He really got into power to get his friends some benefits, but now he has to deal with the reality of governing as well.

At the end of many of the shows the popular kid wins, only to realize he doesn’t want the responsibility that comes with being president and he can’t keep any of his empty promises.Obama is that popular kid.He wants the power, but not the responsibility.It’s about time we learn a lesson, which even kid shows could understand, empty promises don’t mean much.In 2012 let’s make sure we vote for real change, the guy with substance.