Senator Barack Obama is the most captivating political figure our country has seen in some time. I can’t figure out which storyline is more intriguing though: The freshman senator’s platitudes or his supporters’ cult-like obsession with their newfound political messiah.

You don’t need to look far to see the emptiness of Sen. Obama’s campaign for president. The night of Feb. 5, Obama delivered a Super Tuesday victory speech that included some of his best lines of the campaign: “We are the hope of the future,” “We are the change that we seek” or my favorite, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” He followed this up with his best Bob the Builder impersonation, having his audience chant “Yes we can.”

Can anyone read those lines and think they really came from someone running for President? Can anyone really look at this speech, or for that matter any speech Obama has given, and not find the same type of meaningless dribble? How many ways can Obama string hope and change together? Obama surely puts crowds under his spell, but that’s all he is, an orator with no substance.

Obama’s lack of substance extends beyond his preaching to his legislative record, or lack thereof. Although National Journal rated Obama the most liberal senator of 2007, (something that might play well on a college campus but certainly won’t across America) it’s the votes that he didn’t cast that draw attention.

Obama has a history of voting “present” — which is neither a vote in favor or against — on controversial items so that nobody will know his real stance on an issue. In the Illinois legislature, Obama voted present on bills that would prohibit partial-birth abortions, a bill that reduced the sentence for carrying a concealed weapon and a bill that required adult prosecution for firing a gun on school grounds. In 1999, he was the only member of the legislature not to support a bill that protected the privacy of sex-abuse victims by sealing their court records. This is the man who wrote in his book, The Audacity of Hope, “You must vote yes or no on whatever bill comes up, with the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be a compromise that either you or your supporters consider fair and or just.”

Of course, Obama’s worshipers will surely come up with some excuse for why Obama didn’t just cast a “no” vote if he disagreed with the bill, but for the rest of us, those present votes add up. Either Obama is really naïve, or he just chooses not to let anyone know his positions on important issues.

The second, and more relevant to Emory, storyline of the Obama campaign is the participation of college students in his rapid rise in popularity.

Pollster Frank Luntz asked college students at a recent focus group to name the candidate they were going to vote for. All of them said Obama, but when Luntz followed up by asking them to name a single accomplishment of the senator, they couldn’t name one. Nobody could name a single accomplishment that Senator Obama has achieved.

I don’t blame most liberal college students for supporting Obama — it’s hard to get excited by Hillary Clinton, unless you’re a Republican hoping for the chance to face her in the general election. The only thing lonelier than being a Republican at college is being a Hillary Clinton supporter at college. But college students have made Obama the feel-good candidate simply because he’s younger, a good speaker and admits he did cocaine.

They don’t question his ties to the criminal Chicago developer Tony Rezko, his spiritual advisor Jeremiah Wright (who has said Zionism has an element of “white racism”) or his repeated flip-flops on issues ranging from national security to immigration. We can’t expect his supporters to know his position on immigration reform.

The message of Obama as an agent of change and hope is the only one that gets replayed by Obama’s university underlings. Even The New York Times’ Paul Krugman has written “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.” This hero worship is not limited to college campuses. It’s just particularly pronounced there, which isn’t surprising given the “we can do anything” mentality of college students.

Hopefully, as Obama moves from being the presumptive nominee to the actual nominee, he’ll finally offer some specifics rather than the same old clichés. Any Obama supporter needs to seriously consider why they are casting a vote for him. More than likely, it’s a feel-good vote, not cast in favor of anything the junior senator from Illinois would actually do as president.

Josh Prywes is a College junior from Rockville, Md.