My mother would not approve. The bane of my childhood...which was essentially the story of Alexander Portnoy playing softball with Beaver Cleaver and Richie Cunningham in the land of "The Ice Storm"...was her insistence on a thank you note for every occasion. Get an embarrassing set of pajamas from Grandma? Immediately drop everything and send a thank you note. Get $10 from Uncle Max that could have been used to purchase a perfectly wonderful Revell model P-51 Mustang but which your parents hijack and use to buy a new pair of shoes from Tom McCann? Too bad, there will be no staying up late to watch "My Mother the Car" if you don't write a thank you note. Orthodontist slit your gums while installing a torture contraption in your mouth? Probably ought to send a thank you note, just in case.

There was a valuable lesson in this (for which, ironically, I have yet to send my mother a thank you note.) Gratitude makes a difference. Without it, the beneficence dries up and the giver no longer feels so good about giving and your brother and sister end up getting the better presents. (Or the orthodontist develops a grudge against you which is a very bad thing.)

I think it's time to send my mother to Pakistan. And then to Afghanistan. And then to Baghdad. And then perhaps on to a few other choice spots from Honduras to North Korea. This hardly seems like a reward for an exemplary life, but she could teach these folks a lesson or two about gratitude. And then, when she is done with the tour ... and she develops her own perspectives on just how little our efforts at generating gratitude in these places are actually benefitting the United States ... perhaps she ought to come back here and provide a lesson or two for the administration and for some folks on the Hill, perhaps starting with Senator Kerry. Because not only is the United States suffering from something that appears to be much like a global gratitude deficit...it may well be that the problem is with our expectations and our mechanisms for manifesting our (not so selfless) generosity to the less fortunate (or strategically significant) worldwide.

A prime illustration of the problems we face comes in the form of today's New York Times story "In Refugee Aid, Pakistan's War Has a New Front" by Jane Perlex and Pir Zubair Shah. The article describes how the United States is losing the bidding war for the hearts and minds of Pakistanis and how Islamists are edging us out. The authors observe: 

Although the United States is the largest contributor to a United Nations relief effort, Pakistani authorities have refused to allow American officials or planes to deliver the aid in camps for displaced people. The Pakistanis do not want to be associated with their unpopular ally.

At the same time, the article goes on to describe how hard-line givers from the Muslim world are using their donations to effectively promote anti-U.S. and anti-Western views. Meanwhile it notes, even American NGOs are saying we shouldn't advertise the U.S. origins of aid shipments because it is likely to inflame hostility. Seems to me like a lose-lose proposition for us there. I mean, I understand the humanitarian rationale behind giving for the sake of giving but really, isn't the purpose of government aid to advance a government objective? Isn't it clear that's precisely what we are not successfully doing in Pakistan?

But the Pakistani government and the Pakistani people are not the only ones who don't seem to appreciate our aid (or who are happy to take it but would like to continue hating us just the same). In Afghanistan, the Karzai administration would not exist without the United States. Is it showing its gratitude by combating the corruption via which our aid is wasted? Is it showing it by making even the slightest effort to embrace the most fundamental universal values of respect for groups like women or journalists? Read the reports out of Kabul. They just don't seem to appreciate all we have done for them.

Neither, it seems does the al-Maliki government in Baghdad. Now, I can see plenty of reasons why the Iraqi people would be pissed off at America. The illegal invasion of their country, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their people and the devastation of their economy come to mind. But I'm not talking about the Iraqi people here. I'm talking about a government that knows full well that even after the pullback of U.S. troops from the cities, it depends on the continuing presence of U.S. forces in the country to ensure national stability and its grip on power. Couldn't they have toned down the celebrations of "liberation" from the Americans just a trifle to reflect the fact that the United States is continuing to invest so much in their ability to hold on to power?

We spent much training the Honduran military that conducted that country's coup earlier this week. We have pumped serious aid money into North Korea to combat famine. We give the Egyptians, the Palestinians, and the Israelis plenty of cash and there seems to be a competition among them to see who can stall our objectives in the region most effectively or creatively.

Now, I realize we don't need to give aid money to people whose situations are stable. Aid tends to go to places where there are myriad challenges. But something is clearly not working here. The reflexive notion that we should write checks because it will generate goodwill seems not to be working. Clearly part of the problem here is with our expectations. And part of the problem here is with our history and perhaps we need to reconcile ourselves to unappreciated generosity for a while as a way of offsetting years of alienating people worldwide. But clearly another part of it is that we are a little ginger in our communications with our allies on these points...at the very least the governments who depend on us for survival ought to be nudged into a more constructive message with all due care to nuance the message to take into account local political realities.

Finally, the U.S. government aid apparatus remains one of its most dysfunctional. Early in the Obama transition there was talk of spinning out U.S. AID and related agencies into a Department of Development and Aid. I am generally anti-adding new departments to the government. But this was a pretty good idea. Economic peace-keeping and nation-building have been among our prime missions internationally over the past several decades whether we like it or not. But because we don't like it we have resisted building the kind of inter-disciplinary capacity to do it right...to recognize that provision of aid in post-conflict or conflict situations has completely different requirements (mostly political) than it does in development situations and that we need to more effectively blend pacification and economic missions. We need a civilian side Goldwater-Nichols to promote better collaboration and coordination among economic and political agencies in the fulfillment of this mission and better coordination with the military which still reluctantly does much of the heavy lifting in this area.

And beyond what we need, the world needs my mother. This is true on many levels. But in this instance it is because those who depend on our aid need to realize that regardless of who is president in Washington, all politics and history aside, the financial reality is that it is going to become harder and harder for the United States to continue providing aid as we have in the past and that average Americans (and even above-average Americans) are going to be soon looking even more energetically than in the past for excuses to shut the spigots. And that's saying something because aid has always been really unpopular in the United States, it's one of the reasons we give less as a percentage of GDP than most developed countries. Absent the thank you notes (which could be a nice card or possibly just making an effort to help the United States achieve our goals) the gratitude deficit could quickly translate into an aid deficit for those who are accustomed to receiving.

FAROOQ NAEEM/AFP/Getty Images

Somebody needs to do a new wiring diagram for Washington. Because much has changed and much is changing about the way power and influence flow through this town and while some of it is related to having a new president in place, some of it is linked to other technological, political, and social trends. In fact, while motives and many techniques for getting things done in Washington might look very familiar to the old time fixers and back room pols, much would be as alien as a lunar landscape.

Here are just a few random observations from the past few weeks that lead me to this conclusion:

• The influence of the business community is at a low ebb

The stark reality is that there are fewer business people at senior levels of this administration that at any time in decades and the Obama team is much more plugged into other interest groups: NGOs, academics, career politicians, lawyers, regulators, etc. What's more big divisions are emerging within the business community as some old school types hold on hoping that 2010 brings a reversal of fortune for the Democrats while others are being more proactive on issues like health care, energy and climate policy, seeking a seat at the table as a sea-change comes to the public sector-private sector relationship and underlying principles in those areas.

• It's even worse than that for some groups

It used to be that energy and climate policy in America (and a lot else) was heavily influenced by groups like big oil and the auto industry.  Now, as one senior energy executive put it to me, "we just don't have the access we used to. The American Petroleum Institute is completely discredited in the eyes of most of the people in this administration. We can't get in to see anyone."

As for the allies in the auto industry, well, the auto industry ain't what it used to be. And what's left is more heavily dominated by union voices than ever before (when it isn't guided by the interests of the bureaucrats who are in charge of managing the political capital the president has invested in saving GM and Chrysler). The old one-two punch of two of America's most politically powerful industries is gone.

• Traditional media are being trumped by new media

Again, this is hardly news unless you've been sleeping in a cave somewhere for the past few years. But it is really striking to me how in the recent past places like Politico, Real Clear Politics, the Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Drudge, the political blogs and even sites like this one are driving the buzz. Look at the links between what's talked about on broadcast media and where the idea started and these days, more often than not, it isn't the op-ed writers any more. It's palpable in private conversation. Want further proof? From the White House to local embassies, there is a new, concerted focus on shaping web opinion.

• Most think tanks don't get it and are paying a price

Most of the people in the Washington policy community don't seem to get these changes and, as a result, they are losing influence. Most think tanks have lagged in their adoption of new media and when they get on the bandwagon they are doing little more than creating web-based newsletters and channels for releasing old fashioned papers. They still view policy ideas as inert products to be released every so often and they don't recognize the on-going, dynamic, more inclusive nature of the modern policy influencing process. Compounding the challenge, some of the most influential think tanks have been decimated by losses to the administration (Brookings, CAP, CNAS) creating a paradox: at the moment of their greatest influence they are least able to take advantage of the situation. Personally, I think that any think tank that does not realize their entire model of membership, communication, collaboration, fund-raising...even their role in life...needs to change is on a trajectory to irrelevancy.

• Power is shifting and settling in new ways in the national security apparatus too

State Department types have long lamented the gradual shift of power to the NSC over the past several decades. But 24 hour news cycles have made everything political and thus relevant to the White House and it's only natural that it becomes the locus for most big decisions. But within this several-decade-long trend a new trend has emerged. Power continues to increasingly shift to the White House...but within the White House, the shift is away from the NSC per se and more toward the inner office of the president. This was a trend begun during Bush with the outsized role played by his vice president. But it has been maintained...though in a different form...in this White House with a super-engaged and confident president at the center of everything, as the main foreign policy spokesperson and with his closest personal political advisors playing an outsized role in many policy decisions. Rahm Emanuel may be the most powerful chief of staff since Sherman Adams. David Axelrod, Pete Rouse, Greg Craig, and the vice president and his staff are also very influential as are folks like Dennis McDonough and Mark Lippert more thanks to their personal relationships with the president than their official titles at the NSC. 

• Power is shifting within the diplomatic community

Honestly, I think that power is generally shifting away from the diplomatic community. Ambassadors are superfluous as direct contact between higher level government officials becomes so easy and commonplace. Embassy row is a destination for cocktail parties only these days in Washington and a kind of vestigial limb reminding us of the way things worked back in our parents' day. But even within the diplomatic community, influence is shifting. The fact that the BRIC ambassadors meet once a month to coordinate policies is a sign of this shift. Ambassadors of traditional allies like those from Europe and Japan are less significant. The Chinese ambassador, because of the formalities involved in communicating with that government remains more significant. Colombia's ambassador used to be very important. No more. Mexico and Brazil are really the only two Latin ambassadors that matter any longer.

• Washington is now the financial capital of the United States

It's no small thing that we have created the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund to pull us out of the economic morass...even if it is the first such fund entirely debt-financed, and even if the stimulus money is only trickling out. (If Viagra stimulated as slowly as the government's package, Pfizer would also being administered by the White House by now.) But given this newly expanded role of the government, the people who administer these funds at cabinet agencies have become extremely powerful and on many visiting business peoples' must see lists.

These are just a few anecdotal observations. They understate the impact of new media on politics and influence in Washington. And old money politics still remains in place far more than one would have hoped. In some parts of Washington...on Capitol Hill, for example...dinosaurs and Paleolithic ways still rule. But my sense is that if you were to make a list of the 25 most truly influential people in Washington...particularly on the media and policy community side...you would see a new and surprising array of faces. A subject for another blog perhaps. 

TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images

Whereas during the early stages of the upheaval in Iran, the United States seemed to be practicing a new form of tantric foreign policy, come Honduras what we saw from the Obama administration was more a page out of the Kama Sutra for Teenage Boys. It was emphatic, fast, and we bent over backwards to demonstrate that neither were we involved nor were we still caught up in the reflexive left vs. right tug-of-war of the Cold War days. It won Obama big points with regional leaders reaffirming his status as the most innovative new yanqui leader since Joe Torre.

Of course, another reason for the swift action on Honduras is that old faithful of U.S. foreign policy: the law of the prior incident. This law states that whatever we did wrong (or took heat for) during a preceding event we will try to correct in the next one ... regardless of whether or not the correction is appropriate. A particularly infamous instance of this was trying to avoid the on-the-ground disasters of the Somalia campaign by deciding not to intervene in Rwanda. Often this can mean tough with China on pirated t-shirts today, easy with them on WMD proliferation tomorrow, which is not a good thing. In any event, in this instance it produced: too slow on Iran yesterday, hair-trigger on Honduras today. No wonder the State Department's official mascot is the pushmi-pullyu.

And while it may well be that someday U.S. actions with regard to the situations in Iran and Honduras will someday be viewed as absolutely appropriate, questions remain. Does the fact that Iran conducted an election legitimize their government, whether or not that election was fair or other fundamental rights of the Iranian people were denied? Will we treat them as though nothing has happened, as though Neda were still alive, the next time we sit down to negotiate with them? And in the case of Honduras, we now must wonder what we should do if the missteps of President Zelaya's opponents (well described in an op-ed by Alvaro Vargas Llosa in today's New York Times) will empower him on his almost inevitable return to that country, making it easier still for him to follow through on his ambition to rewrite the constitution so he can serve beyond current limits. This may look and feel fair and even democratic, but using the power of the majority (or of office) to lock into place the power of a single individual or political group is actually neither.

You don't have to look too far way, of course, to see the potential damage such an approach can cause. In fact, it is clear that Zelaya, a charter member of the Hugo Chávez fan club, was contemplating the kind of political sleight of hand that rewrote the rules in Venezuela.

Immediate policy responses aside, what the juxtaposition of the Iranian and Honduran examples clearly illustrates is the ongoing set of problems associated with a too simplistic view of democracy and its role as a key metric in determining U.S. policy.

Our embrace of such a view over the past few years has sent the message that the mere act of publicly conducting a vote is seen as a shield behind which all manner of misdeeds can be undertaken with impunity. In Iran's case the illusion of democracy is used to excuse, forgive and enable fraud and repression. For Hugo and those seeking to emulate him, it is used to cloak the undermining of important elements of the rule of law. 

The technique has been used with ever-growing chutzpah from Moscow to Zimbabwe. It is the blending of hypocrisy and democracy into a cocktail that could be known as "democrisy." And that cocktail is a particular weakness of U.S. foreign policy at the moment. This is in part our own doing. We're the ones who elevated the unidimensional, ballot-box-centric definition of democracy to a near-theological concept. But as we have seen again in recent weeks, a society that votes but has no freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no freedom of religion, no free press, no provisions to protect minorities from tyranny of the majority, and/or a disregard for the rule of law is no more a democracy than a dog that walks on his hind legs is a principal ballerina for the Bolshoi.

We knew it all along, of course. But we were so eager to salute the spread of democracy as an American triumph that we started taking credit for a bunch of lowest common denominator democratic revolutions and the rise of tinpot Jeffersons when we should have been more circumspect and demanding. Voting without the intent to honor basic rights is no more a sure step on the road to real democracy than making out in the back seat of your car is a step on the road to marriage. 

Ten years after Fareed Zakaria's introduction of the idea of "illiberal democracy" and 220 years after the Federalist Papers, we ought to know better. Of course, a cynic might argue that we do. It often suits us to use a minimalist definition of democracy and we do so as manipulatively as any of the populists or authoritarians we decry. We use it to justify inaction against regimes when we simply don't want to get involved for one reason or another -- because in Iran we have other fish to fry, because we want to feel like things are going better than they are in Afghanistan or, similarly, because we want to feel ok about getting the heck out of Dodge (Baghdad and Fallujah) in an Iraq where the government can hardly be said to be sufficiently transparent or effectively representative of the views of the Iraqi people. 

Such an approach is convenient for us. But we can hope it will evolve. Just as it is reasonable to decry the coup in Honduras as a throwback to the days when Woody Allen's Bananas looked like a documentary, so too might we hope for a time when the hemisphere and the world might move beyond acceptance of the edition of "Democracy for Dummies" that has become the standard textbook for demagogues and start embracing and demanding higher standards from its elected leaders.

Jose CABEZAS/AFP/Getty Images

Two men were overheard chatting at a Cosi restaurant in DC this weekend. One said, "You know, with the death of Ed McMahon, Farrah, and Michael Jackson, I think the 70s also died. They're over with once and for all." The other guy said, without hesitation, "I'd believe that if Jimmy Carter weren't still president."

Hey, don't shoot the messenger. I just overheard the conversation. (Please read on for my rather different view.) 

Personally, I found the obsessive retrospectives about Michael Jackson a little disgusting. His commercial success for a few years as a pop singer seemed to trump the dark and unsavory aspects of his life. But he was no hero. He was certainly no one to be celebrating. Unless of course, you were an ayatollah. Because one of the truly transcendental ironies of recent history has to be the fact that a symbol of the worst sort of Western spiritual and social corruption...celebrity worship, drug culture, financial excess, debauchery...ended up providing just the distraction that the keepers of the Islamic Revolution's flame in Tehran needed to direct the world's attention away from their abuses of their own people. 

In an instant, the really important story of tens of millions struggling to be heard in Iran was swept off the air by the death of a 50 year old accused pedophile in America. CNN, which had been congratulating itself daily for bringing the "green revolution" in Iran to the world as only it could in an instant tossed its news judgment out the window and started offering 24/7 retrospectives on how Michael Jackson chose the red leather jacket he wore in the "Thriller" video.  It was an appalling, cheap and cynical programming choice made worse by the fact that other major stories...from the Congress passing the landmark Waxman-Markey climate legislation to the coup in Honduras...were left to play the role only of journalistic spackle, filling in the cracks between paeans to a man who spent the last twenty years shocking the world with his unhinged depravity.

The sad reality is that none of the celebrities who died in the past week say much good about American culture or the state of hero worship in America. 

Which brings us back to Obama and the overheard Carter crack. Because one way that Obama is clearly unlike Carter is that he has already achieved something momentous and, occasional cigarette aside, he actually does offer Americans a leader whose story is legitimately inspiring. It is far too early to tell whether he will be able to add to a legacy that has already been assured by the fact of his election...but Friday's passage of the Waxman-Markey legislation and the administration's vigorous defense of the bill is a sign that it just might.

The change in the America's stance on the issue of global warming is one of the most dramatic and meaningful of the Obama era. (Don't believe me? See Angela Merkel's recent comments on the subject.) It will not be easy to get Senate passage of similar legislation. Insiders on the Hill with whom I have spoken suggest that in all likelihood the Senate bill will be sidetracked by the healthcare debate and may not be even voted until after the Copenhagen climate summit. This in turn will mean the United States goes in saying "we can go this far if China and India commit to reductions" which is perhaps not optimal, but may well be a good negotiating position.

And if China and India and the other developing countries do commit to meaningful emissions reductions within a reasonable period, then early in 2010 Senate passage and a final bill going to the President seems likely. (One senator told me that the key to selling the bill is letting Americans know they won't be the only ones sacrificing and that for him, the Chinese are the lynchpin. In fact, he said the issue of coal-burning Midwestern states vs. the alternative energy loving coasts is overstated and that  it will be fairly easily settled via "the usual horse trading that goes on up here.") 

The United States has never been closer to meaningful action on combating climate change and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. It would be a simultaneous breakthrough in climate security, energy security and economic security. The opposition's antics on the legislation (including Representative Boehner's reference to the just passed legislation as a piece of shit) well illustrated their desperation and cluelessness.  In fact, the people on the wrong side of this legislation once it passes will be seen as being on the wrong side of history and will be very vulnerable to election challenges on those grounds. Especially since recent estimates, like those of the Congressional Budget Office, underscore how minimal the financial impact of the cap and trade provisions of the bill will be on the average family.

I wish CNN and others in the broadcast media had covered this story as they should have and given the president the great credit he deserves for fighting for it. (A nuanced stance which, over the weekend included the airing of the president's principled objections to provisions in Waxman-Markey requiring tariffs be levied against nations that don't commit themselves to emissions reductions.) The well being of millions and perhaps the fate of the planet hangs in the balance and as a consequence, I think a fair case can be made that we could have cut back on the interviews with Lisa Marie and Dame Elizabeth long enough to let the news creep through the maudlin aggrandizement of a featherweight, self-inflicted, altogether tawdry American tragedy.

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

Mark it on your calendars.  It was in June 2009 that Barack Obama's honeymoon officially ended.  And to be more specific, it was this past week.  Through some mysterious alchemy, this was the week that Bush's economy became Obama's, Bush's wars became Obama's, and the ups and downs of a real workaday relationship with the press also introduced Obama to a more accurate sense of what life was like for Bush and for all his other modern predecessors.

While the change is clear for the reasons I will note below, no one should lament the end of the honeymoon, even though it may be hard for Obama and his colleagues in the Administration not to.  It must be nice looking out into the White House press room and seeing all those hardened reporters looking as dewy-eyed and adoring as a teen-aged girl who discovers that Robert Pattinson has appeared at her doorstep to take her to the prom.  But five months is not bad for a honeymoon.  I've had two and the best I could do was a little over a week.   (During the first honeymoon, my new wife spent most of the few days we had throwing up...which should have been an early warning sign that another honeymoon would be in the cards.)

Of course, people have been writing about the end of Obama's honeymoon since the day he arrived in office.  But let me offer 10 solid pieces of evidence that it was over by this week.  And I say this despite the unnerving fact that the Daily Kos seems to agree with my assessment...and shored up by the fact that NBC's Chuck Todd, CNN's Jack Cafferty, CQ, the Huffington Post, the New York Daily News, and a host of other media outlets all seem to agree by having grappled with the issue...or, depending on how you look at it, succumbed to the conventional wisdom...in the past week or 10 days.  Just goes to show: even the conventional wisdom is right every once in a while.

Media herd mentality aside, here are 10 reasons (in no particular order) why a reasonable person might conclude that we have entered a new chapter in the Obama presidency in the past few days:

1. Ask not for whom the poll tolls...

The most common reason cited by pundits for saying Obama's entered a new phase was polling data, like an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll citing growing doubts about the administration's economic policies.  He is seen as the author of budget deficit increases (even though he is responsible for only a tiny fraction of projected shortfalls), an expanded government role in the economy and moves in Detroit that have a majority of voters uneasy...which also suggests that we're on Obama Time now in the economy. It's his to fix or screw up further.

Sometimes a hot dog is just a hot dog. But sometimes visions of July 4th frankfurter diplomacy with representatives of the Iranian regime, among others, suggest real foreign policy short-sightedness. Hadn't anyone thought through what might happen in the elections? Of course, the cook-out kerfuffle was just pigs in a blanket compared to the administration's tentativeness in response to the unrest in Iran. It might have been the right call at first, but the Iranian crisis quickly revealed that even charming, smart presidents get hamstrung on issues where there are few good responses and none without some negative consequences.

3. No matter who is president, Kim Jong Il is still nuts...

Kim Jong Il has spent the past month reinforcing the preceding point.  "You may be Mr. Charisma," he says via his missile tests and nuclear experiments, "by I am Mr. Certifiable Loon. Which in the rock-paper-scissors of international diplomacy means I win every time." All of a sudden, Obama finds when it comes to North Korea...and a host of other places...sitting in the Oval Office makes him look and act a lot like his predecessor no matter how much he wishes it weren't so.

4. Speaking of nuts, what about U.S. trade rhetoric?

One sign that the sweet glide is over is when after you mete out a policy here and a policy there, you look back and discover none of it makes any sense.  In the past week USTR Ron Kirk has threatened to go after the EU if they offer more financial help to Airbus and a few days earlier the US was threatening to go after China for the Buy Chinese provisions in their stimulus package. But, um, aren't we subsidizing Detroit and don't we have Buy America provisions in our stimulus package? As my daughters would say, "awkward!"

5. Obama's doctor and his financial guru turn on him in one week...

At the height of the economic crisis, Warren Buffet was the sage that helped win the election for Obama. Then this week he demonstrates that troubling candor and independence that made him so widely respected by going starkly off message. He joked that despite recent eye surgery he doesn't see any "green shoots" in the economy. He also called it a shambles. Then Obama's own doctor went after the health care plan. Et tu, Bones? Keep your friends close, they say, and your enemies closer. But what happens when they start to sound alike?

6. Kissing up to a president who smokes is like kissing an ashtray...

The president insists he is only an occasional smoker.  Doesn't matter.  Smoking is gross, sets a bad example and is so 20th Century. It may have been cool in the parking lot at Punahou, Mr. President, but not in the Rose Garden. The nastiness over questions for the president on this subject also really captured the testy relationship emerging between the president and his former groupies in the press corp, best described in a New York Times account that made you feel "if this is how testy he gets this early in the game, what should we expect when he's been stewing in office for a few years?"

7. Fixing health care can be dangerous to your political health...

Health care is the one area of the U.S. economy most urgently in need of a major structural fix... and that's saying something. But, according to one senator with whom I spoke, "the health care battle is certain to leave blood on the walls...and that's just among us Democrats." It has shredded formidable pols in the past (place a call to Foggy Bottom if you don't recall) and while an Obama win is likely in the long-run, it may drain the energy from other pursuits.

8. Warming is global but all politics are local...

Among those casualties of health care reform is likely to be getting a climate bill out of the Congress this year. The Administration is pulling out the stops (to their credit) behind Waxman-Markey... but insiders say what with health care in the way, a deal in the Senate is unlikely before the Copenhagen summit in December. The U.S. will therefore go in saying "this is what we might be able to do" which could be a great negotiating ploy or a real problem if it pushes China and the developing countries to say, "we won't commit until you do... and even then we'll need a long runway to hard limits." This is a signature issue for the president and it looks like it won't happen till 2010 in the best case.

9. Hillary's fracture was not the first in the administration...

Hillary falls and breaks her elbow...and some people in White House offices are amused and making jokes. In fact, some folks in the State Department are doing likewise. Why, because the one big happy family fantasy that every administration enters with is starting to morph into a more typical reality. First leaked shots against Jim Jones. Then same against HRC. Even early signs of jockeying to replace what some see as a likely Jones departure in a year or two. (Go for the Trifecta on Rice, Steinberg and Holbrooke to win, place and show. But who finishes first? Only Dennis McDonough knows for sure.)

10. The "politics of change" succumbs to politics as usual...

The honeymoon is over when you have to roll up and put away your old campaign slogans. As the big donors start measuring the curtains for their embassies worldwide, it's clear that "the politics of change" has been overtaken by events...like the big fund-raising events which feature the president slipping through loopholes in order to appear to turn away from lobbyist money while actually raising bucks for the party the old fashioned way.

And, of course, because the intractable problems keep piling up in the president's inbox and the responses to them inevitably make them the unwanted property of this president rather than merely a legacy from the last, I could easily make a much longer list. Pakistan is an incurable and deepening mess. So's Afghanistan. Our guy on the ground in Baghdad is calling the departure of U.S. troops a victory for the Iraqi people. Our strongest vote of confidence in the Middle East comes from Hamas leaders who are absolutely certain to screw us the minute negotiations get tough. The global economy is still on life support. California is tanking. 

Other signs the days of moonlight and violins are over? You can only buy one puppy per term of office. (I think it's in the constitution.) Michelle can't carry him forever. Biden fatigue. And of course, the number one reason of them all: it's just plain time for the honeymoon to be over anyway.

That's 20 reasons off the top of my head. To me that is as convincing a message as my first wife barfing into the private dip pool in Grenada while abandoned Cuban military vehicles rusted in the distance. The honeymoon is done. Time for a real life marriage. For better or for worse.

AFP/Getty Images