The honeymoon stage of the Obama campaign has officially come to an end.

Though discussions of party unity and Hillary Clinton have subsided, they’ve quickly been replaced by new debate about Obama’s recent atypical positions taken — namely on the recent repeal of the Washington, D.C., handgun ban, the U.S. Supreme Court child rape case and the electronic wiretapping bill.

This supposed pragmatic shift has been a marked change from the idealistic and leftist Obama of the primaries. Though I’ve been an admitted Obama enthusiast from early on, the “new” Obama has presented me with a number of issues that have been difficult to reconcile.

There’s little question that he’s running to the right in order to attract more moderate voters, but his opinions on recent issues make his sincerity — of both the past and present — doubtful.

For someone who was attracted by Obama’s nuanced defenses of his sometimes-controversial opinions, it’s hard not to see a number of his recent decisions as a compromise of his previous insistence on thorough assessment.

In the child rape case, for example, where the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to punish the rape of children 12 and younger with the death penalty, Obama stated that in some instances the punishment would not be unconstitutional.

Though the statement may play to the worries of concerned parents, Obama ignores the very strong argument made against capital punishment for child rape, which includes the unreliability of child testimony, the disproportionate relation of the punishment to the crime — a violation of the Eighth Amendment — and the effect the decision would have on the reporting of a crime that already goes drastically underreported.

With most cases of child rape and sexual abuse being committed by people the children already know, often the crimes aren’t reported in an attempt to protect the friends and family members who commit them. The possibility for the death sentence would only worsen matters.

Further evidence of Obama’s new, less nuanced reasoning: his support of the electronic wiretapping bill, a deeply flawed piece of legislation that provided only superficial concessions to congressional demands for keeping telecommunication companies and the Bush administration accountable.

The old Obama likely would have decried the abuse of civil liberties in the bill, but the new Obama went along with it although he had promised to filibuster it in the past.

Though Obama has lost some integrity by showing that he plays to the crowd, what’s more troubling is his acceptance of the idea that he must choose between idealism or pragmatism — that it is one or the other, and that he should be perceived as less liberal.

His positions in the past few weeks, however, have been neither practical nor grounded in the values that carried him through the primary season.

Much like when Dorothy uncovered the inner workings of the Wizard of Oz, it has been a disenchanting glimpse of a leader who’s been idolized for his idealism.

It’s an important reminder that none of the leaders who have caused great change in this country have been perfect men with perfect records. It has only been the presence of a committed populace that keeps those (mostly) well-intentioned leaders accountable.

In many ways, this politicking has been good for Obama supporters — many of whom, like myself, are young and more convinced by idealistic appeals — because it demonstrates that no leader, however eloquent, should be built up as a golden cow. Rather, their decisions should be evaluated on their merits, and they should not be given carte blanche because of the political party they belong to.