I watched yesterday as Barack Obama and his wife danced to Etta James' "At Last," during network coverage of the inaugural balls. Then I watched again as the networks cut in to catch the first couple dance to the same song again at another ball. Then a third time. And fourth. And fifth. Overkill? Yeah, I think so. Still, it was a historic day that capped off a historic election season.

Not really.

Obama is a half-white, Harvard-educated partisan politician from Chicago. Sounds like your average ward politico to me. Although the “historic victory” claim is arguable, the media should have been calling it half-historic. Here’s why:

First, the guy’s not even African-American. He does not retain dual citizenship with any African nation. Apologies to the media who wet their pants over this highly educated but inexperienced liberal whose skin color is the darkest the Oval Office has ever seen. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make him African-American. I’m largely German, but it doesn’t make me German-American. I’m simply an American, just like my President.

To call him African-American (even Time magazine unfortunately fell into that trap when it named Obama its “Person of the Year”) is both untrue and unfair. It’s insulting, one biracial friend told me, because the charge simply disregards the rest of his heritage, and considering that his white mother raised him as a single parent, I think it’s a sell out to people of mixed race. Long gone are the days of the “one-drop” rule, an outdated and racist Jim Crow-era term that stripped people of their white ancestry if they had even the slightest amount of sub-Saharan ancestry. Or so I thought. Nowadays it’s used to the benefit of blacks, who embrace that identity even if their blood line is 99% Caucasian.

So, when the Associated Press reported Nov. 5 that Obama had won more support from white voters in a two-man race since 1976, were we supposed to believe that? By “white,” does AP include mixed-race voters as well? I don’t think so, because the identification of mixed-race voters always defaults to the minority race. But it shouldn’t. Obama should be judged on his voting record in the Senate; his plans to unite the nation and return it to its prosperous glory days in a matter of four years; and his actions as president.

Second, the election also doesn’t make him a black president. And I’m not counting Bill Clinton, who, in 2001, was honored as the nation’s “first black president” by the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Awards Dinner in Washington, D.C. Obama himself acknowledged – albeit in a bizarre but serious press conference comment when he called himself a mutt – that he isn’t black but of mixed race. He’s biracial. That’s why I can’t understand why the popular media and 52% of American voters refuse to admit that as half-historic as this is, he’s still part white. His father, a native Kenyan economist, abandoned Obama and his mother when the future president was just two years old. His mother, a white Kansas native, raised him in Hawaii before moving to Indonesia and later back to the United States.

The closest Obama has come to openly acknowledging his white ancestry is by calling himself a mutt: During his very first post-election press conference he addressed the question of adopting a dog. “…our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but obviously a lot of shelter dogs are mutts — like me,” he said. Huh?

Third, and most controversially, no matter how you spin it, Obama likely isn’t even our first mixed-race president. We may have already voted for our first-mixed-race president in 1921.

Historians and genealogists have suggested that two of Warren G. Harding’s great-grandparents were black, and even the New York Times earlier this year published the following statement: “The circumstantial case for Harding’s mixed-race ancestry is intriguing though not definitive.”

In the 1920s genealogist William Eastbrook Chancellor helped published a biography of Harding in which he accused that the Harding family covered up his background, which included a great-grandmother who was of West Indian descent. Chancellor also said that he had found dozens of acquaintances and neighbors back in Harding’s Ohio home town who backed up the claim that Harding ancestors included blacks as well as whites.

Finally, the “record” turnout at the polls didn’t end up being as much of a record as we have been accustomed to hearing: About 61% of eligible voters cast their ballots in 2008, compared to a slightly lower figure – 60% – just four years ago, according to American University political scientist Curtis Gans. In my mind that doesn’t make it historic. The fact that 96% of black voters cast their ballots for a mixed-race Democratic candidate shouldn’t surprise us too much, but it is noteworthy if only because it was a two-percentage-point rise.

If anything is historic, it’s that Obama is the first president to inherit a gross national debt above $10 trillion. He’s the first to be featured on the cover of Rolling Stone before even being elected. He’s the first president to renege on promises to the electorate before even being inaugurated (His pledge of redistribution of wealth from an immediate repeal of Bush-administration tax cuts drew praise among the middle class during the campaign, but Obama only recently reversed that pledge, saying that he would simply let tax cuts for people making more $250,000 a year expire as scheduled at the end of 2010.).

The bottom line is that the American people fell in love, puppy love. And this self-admitted mutt, with his wide, toothy smile and big ears, captured much of the nation’s heart by capitalizing on emotion. He promises action, but then again they always do.

I don’t doubt that Obama’s tax plan likely would benefit me more than McCain’s, but I’m a skeptical independent, so my expectations for a chubbier bank account in the next four years are low.

Both the media and the public have painted Obama as the centrist of all centrists, a guy whose sincerity at uniting America is irresistible and electric.

But Obama already is contradicting himself:

He wrote in his book, “The Audacity of Hope” – “As I watched my mostly Republican Senate colleagues hang on (President Bush’s) every word, I was reminded of the dangerous isolation that power can bring, and I appreciated the wisdom of America’s founding fathers in designing a system to keep power in check.”

Yet just one week after being elected, the Washington Post reported that a team of four dozen advisers would be consulting with advocacy groups and potential agency chiefs to prioritize a list of about 200 Bush administration executive orders covering everything from reproductive rights to climate change that Obama could reverse … all policies that the Democrats find “ideologically offensive.” Doesn’t sound very centrist to me.

It’s too late to argue about whether Sen. John McCain should have been elected president over Sen. Barack Obama, but it’s not too late to warn Americans that puppy love rarely lasts. And please drop this “historic” racial aspect and start focusing on the real (but yet to be realized) historic aspect: That the 44th president will inherit a $10 trillion national debt, a flagging international reputation and a depressed electorate. If in four years those turn around, only then will it be historic. But if he has to tell us during the 2012 campaign that we still need to be patient to see through the slow but rewarding process of turning this nation around, well, don’t say I didn't tell you so.

Voters would have had to be entirely stupid to think that Obama’s campaign pledges regarding issues such as health care and energy policy would outweigh the incomprehensible challenge of deficit reduction. But within just a few weeks of the election, he was already cautioning Americans that they shouldn’t expect the “change” he pledged any time soon … at least until he tackles reduction of the deficit.

But it seems like some of his supporters already are OK with that.

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, wrote: “My elation about the Obama presidency is not to be confused with my expectation of the Obama administration. But for now I will defer my fears and my anxieties.”

If Obama fails to meet many of those expectations he created during his candidacy, he’ll be just another mutt in the pound: all bark and, well, you get the picture. Just remember that puppy love rarely lasts. And that there’s nothing remarkable about mutts just because they’re adopted into the White House.