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Soon after Tony Blair was elected Britain's prime minister, a cartoonist drew a young boy holding his father's hand as they walk down the street.
"Daddy," asks the boy, "why does Tony Blair let bad things happen?"
Australia is in a similar swoon. The country has greeted Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministerial advent as messianic. Like Blair at the beginning, he has the blessing of enormous public goodwill, and the curse of impossible expectations.
From the north of the country: "He was mobbed in what is traditional Labor heartland," reported The Courier Mail when Turnbull visited the Queensland town of Logan three weeks ago.
To the south: "He was greeted like a rock star during his street walk," observed Tasmania's Launceston Examiner when he visited there a week later. "It's the most exciting time to be a Tasmanian," the Prime Minister told his admirers.
From the big end of town: "Prime Minister," said Business Council of Australia president Catherine Livingstone at the council's annual dinner, "there is a new sense of optimism in this room, and around the country.
"In just seven weeks in the role, the impact you have had on national sentiment is almost unparalleled. You have given us the permission to have conversations about things that matter to people, and helped, through your own example, to make those conversations positive."
To the small: After a day touring Parliament House and meeting politicians, Aboriginal teenager Matthew McDonald was asked to pick his highlight, reported The Australian, and replied: "The Prime Minister pouring me a cup of tea. Where do you see that happening? I reckon that was awesome."
Even in the ranks of the enemy, organised labour, some of the fight has drained out after Malcolm's triumphal ascension. A survey by the ACTU found a jump of 10 per cent in the number of union members who say they are undecided in how to vote at the next election, as Fairfax Media's Michael Gordon reports.
The ACTU secretary, Dave Oliver described it as "a temporary increase in undecided voters who are prepared to give Malcolm Turnbull the benefit of the doubt". At least, he hopes it's temporary.
Is there anyone who hasn't fallen under the Turnbull spell? He is the most popular new prime minister of the past two decades, based on his debut rating in the Fairfax-Ipsos poll.
His net approval rating on taking the job was higher than those of John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott.
On a test of 10 positive leader attributes, most Australians rate Turnbull as possessing all of them. On the basis of their poll debuts, Turnbull is regarded as more competent than Howard, more open to ideas than Gillard and a stronger leader than Abbott. And he is rated as better in every way than Labor leader Bill Shorten, who went in a single moment from being Australia's luckiest politician to its unluckiest.
Nonetheless, there is still a curmudgeonly 16 per cent who disapprove of the way Turnbull's doing his job, according to the latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll.
That's about two and a quarter million voters, probably too many for Malcolm to serve tea individually. It's surprising that so many are so churlishly refusing to join the euphoria.
Because Turnbull hasn't had to make any tough decisions yet.
He's made some important decisions, and credit where it's due. In one of his very first acts, he did commit $100 million towards a new program against domestic violence. An emotional Rosie Batty responded: "We finally are starting to hear from the leaders of our country that they are addressing this issue."
He was quickly tested by a terrorist incident in Sydney. When a 15-year-old recruited by Daesh, which wants to be called Islamic State, murdered an unarmed police accountant, Turnbull reacted deftly.He denounced terrorism, urged Australians to go about the grand final long weekend as usual, and expressed solidarity with the decent people of Sydney's Muslim communities.
And he did conduct himself credibly through the seasonal whirlwind of diplomacy in summits from Jakarta to Germany and on to Turkey, Manila and Malaysia.
But the tough decisions lie ahead. And the external circumstances are moving against him.
The Treasury has finally abandoned its wishful projections on economic growth. This means that Turnbull will be presented with less revenue than forecast by the Abbott budget just five months ago. How much less?
About $50 billion over ten years, according to accountancy firm PwC.
The immediate effects will be on display in next month's regular budget update. That will make Turnbull's job harder because it means the deficits will keep growing unless he can find new ways to cut spending. The iron ore price, too, is still falling, inflicting billions more in damage to anticipated tax revenues.
And the Paris terrorist attacks have put a new pall of fear across the rich countries. The killings were bad enough, but the Western world's near-hysterical response has given the terrorists a much bigger prize.
This makes his theme of irrepressible optimism even more essential, yet harder to sustain.
When he eventually starts to make tough decisions and the euphoria fades, the new prime minister will have to navigate between two dangerous sets of forces. To stay in power long enough to make a lasting difference, Turnbull will have to observe the 30:30 rule, a new construct in Australian politics.
The first 30 that he needs to manage is the Right faction of his own party room and its spokesman, Tony Abbott. The figure of 30 is a rough proxy for their number. It's not a formally constructed faction a la Labor's factions, and there aren't exactly 30 members. The figure is taken from the number of MPs and senators who voted for Kevin Andrews in the party ballot for deputy Liberal leader.
In the choice between Julie Bishop and Kevin Andrews, Bishop won 70 votes. Andrews won the other 30. The then-defence minister didn't stand expecting to win, but he did give conservatives in the party an alternative to Bishop. He allowed them to make a statement.
Since then, Tony Abbott has been making most of the statements for the group. The former prime minister has been infuriating the current one by publicly setting out more hawkish positions on the war, or more correctly wars, in Syria. Kevin Andrews has chimed in too.
It's heartfelt, but it's not responsible. They're publicly calling for more Australian special forces soldiers to be sent to Syria. They know that it wouldn't make a material difference for Australia unilaterally to send a few hundred ground troops into a giant, churning maelstrom of murder where a dozen nations and militias and over a hundred thousand fighters are engaged in a chaotic struggle for advantage.
And they know that Turnbull isn't about to send them, for the very same reasons that Abbott and Andrews didn't when they were able to, as prime minister and defence minister, just a few short weeks ago.
They're guilty of political posturing, with Australian military personnel the medium for their mischief.
With Labor's Bill Shorten huddling close to the government on all things national security, this makes Abbott the de facto leader of the opposition.
Roy Morgan conducted a poll this week that found six in 10 Australians do not support sending ground troops to Syria, while four in 10 did. Morgan wouldn't have even asked the question were it not for Abbott.
Abbott, Andrews and others in the Right will find other subjects where they will offer dissenting opinions in the months ahead as we move into climate change season and then budget season.
They share opinions, but also anger. They're angry at being run out of office by the Turnbull team, and they have the sympathy of what has been reported this week as the "Monkey Pod", the social gathering of conservatives who meet in a parliamentary room of that name.
The Labor party showed that a small, determined band of dissidents can cause mayhem if it chooses to. Turnbull and the rest of the government need to try to manage the 30 to prevent serious destabilisation and outright insurrection. He doesn't need their love, but he does need their quiescence.
That's the first 30. The second? When Turnbull announced his challenge to Abbott for the leadership, he said "We have lost 30 Newspolls in a row. It is clear that the people have made up their mind about Mr Abbott's leadership."
This establishes an explicit new criterion for prime ministerial performance. If Turnbull's government should lose 30 in a row, he will have to accept that anyone in his party has an automatic right to challenge him. That means he can only afford to be behind in the polls for about 15 months without legitimising a challenger.
It may be hard to imagine just now, but it was just as hard during their honeymoons to imagine that Tony Blair and Kevin Rudd would end up with as much public disdain as they did.
This 30 is a proxy for public opinion. He has to keep the 30 conservatives in his party quiescent, but without alienating the voters for 30 consecutive Newspolls, the 30:30 rule.
They're not independent factors, either. If the Right rises up, it will dominate the news and Turnbull's polling will suffer. Conversely, if Turnbull's polling suffers, the Right will feel emboldened to rise up.
Turnbull needs to manage both at once.
If not, bad things will happen. To Malcolm.
