Gee!

By next summit, we’ll surely see a less effusive, even “Golly, gee!” Obama. Attending his first such get together, however, and certainly being confident and unselfconscious enough to let his excitement show through, history will record many shots such as this one, of the President just plain “stoked,” as people used to say.

At the same time, chumming with Burlusconi, the crooked media mogul-turned-PM (twice over) and Putin’s lightweight tool Medvedev, this moment could be analagous to the experience where, coming across a forgotten picture taken years before in your first week at a new school, your reaction is: “what was I doing it up with those guys for?”

(Reuters/Pool. caption:U.S President Barack Obama (L) laughs with Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (C) and Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev as they pose for a family photograph at the G20 summit at the ExCel centre, in east London April 2, 2009. World leaders are set to declare an end to unfettered capitalism at a G20 summit on Thursday after France and Germany demanded they act fast on promises to prevent a repeat of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.)