Many of the liberals and progressives who helped Obama get elected have been frustrated in the first three weeks of his administration. They saw Obama's opening move of soliciting bi-partisan support for the stimulus package as one of weakness. Visits to the Capitol, cocktail parties, and a Superbowl watching party didn't look like power moves, especially from a new president with an enormous "mandate" for change. The mainstream media has played its role of useful idiot to the Right Wing to perfection, loudly intoning that President Obama's "honeymoon" seemed to be over already.
I have read the U.S. Constitution many times and I have never seen the words "mandate" or "honeymoon" in that document. Politics is the art of the possible, and there are really only two things that practical politicians need to keep track of: that which you can do, and that which you cannot do. The metric for measuring these things and deciding which is which is the art of vote counting, specifically counting the votes you have in Congress before they are actually cast.