Barack Obama is president because people wanted to believe the best of him. He convinced them “hope” that he would “change” Washington. Obama could be trusted; he wasn’t just another politician who would say one thing to get elected and then do the opposite.

Wrong! Obama has been in office only six months and already has a string of broken promises or vows that have “changed course” or “stalled.”

Actually, Obama’s record is worse than that because promise auditors like PolitiFact and National Journal aren’t tracking all of Obama’s broken promises — like the big one on taxes*. I covered that topic in my latest column for American Issues Project:

If you heard it once during the 2008 presidential campaign, you heard it a thousand times: Barack Obama will not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

Obama made the pledge most emphatically in New Hampshire, where people live free and die knowing they paid low taxes. “I can make a firm pledge,” he said last September. “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

A majority of voters either believed that pledge, or didn’t care that Obama was inviting them to read his lips, because they sent him to the White House and gave liberals control of Congress to boot. Now the taxman is in town, and he will be knocking on taxpayers’ doors again and again.

He has already staked his first claim. Congress passed, and Obama signed into law, a bill that increased tobacco taxes to help fund the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

And that’s just a start. Obama and his allies also have raised the possibility of taxes on mileage, employer-subsidized health plans, liquor and sugary drinks, plus hidden taxes on electricity and cars. All of those would hit people below the $250,000 threshold.

Read my column for the details.

* For the record, PolitiFact waffled on whether Obama broke his promise about raising taxes on people who make more than $250,000 a year. Apparently, the fact-checkers over there think it depends on what the meaning of the word “any” is, as in “any form of tax increase” and “not any of your taxes.”