We’re a little more than eight months into Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard’s term of service, and his wheels are starting to fall off.

First, he backtracked on his promises not to bring powerful lawyers and lobbyists into his inner circle. Then he hired a bunch of washed-up political hacks, even creating new, high-paid positions for some of them. (Yes, I’m talking about you, Sarah Taylor.)

More recently, Ballard violated his stringent campaign pledge to never cut public safety funding by slicing more than $5 million out of the Marion County Jail budget. He’s also pushing a secretive plan to privatize the Mayor’s Action Center, and he’s now entered into a no-bid contract with an ethically questionable real estate developer to analyze and subsequently sell off small city parks. Ballard, in a recent interview with the Indianapolis Star editorial board, said he just doesn’t “make the connection between a property the size of this room and green space.”

What’s happened to this average fella, who not long ago was the poster child for every aspiring pol hoping to take on a Goliath administration?

Allow me to explain.

Ballard came to the dance as an outsider. He brought no date. He just showed up with a lot of hope and an empty dance card. Though he was born with two left feet and a tendency to hover around the punch bowl, he somehow wound up prom king. And then everyone lined up to get a piece.

That’s where his problems began.

See, there are people who understand that life, to a certain extent, is politics, and there are people like Ballard — middle managers who take orders and sometimes get to give a few, too. Politics is chess. Ballard plays checkers.

Ma and Pa Wags taught me that you can count your true friends in life on one hand; everyone else wants something.

Ballard hasn’t learned that lesson yet.

And so we get people like Bob Grand and Joe Loftus and John Bales running our city and carting off large pieces of the taxpayer pie behind closed doors.

Don’t get me wrong: They’re not bad people, but they wouldn’t be returning Ballard’s phone calls if he didn’t have “Mayor” in front of his name. In fact, had he lost last November, they’d be doing their best to bring in business from the other side of the aisle. These people exist in every administration and also in the business world; you just have to know how to handle them.

A Republican friend and I were talking a few weeks back about the need for every elected official to have a close adviser with no vested interest, someone who’s there to say, “Hey, friend, I wouldn’t do that because [insert unpleasant consequence here] will happen, and you’ll look bad.”

In other words, someone to deflect the thousand fake smiles and upward-turned, freebie-seeking hands that follow power around like a wheedling pup.

Unfortunately for Ballard, even his team of press folks, his conduit to the people who buy ink by the barrel, are defensive amateurs who were cast off from the better-oiled Republican machine at the other end of Market Street.

I’m going to say one more time that I don’t think Greg Ballard is a bad guy.

I will say, however, that I think he’s tremendously naive, and he’s going to be a bad mayor because he doesn’t have the wherewithal to stick to his core values amid an onslaught of requests from people who have their, not his, best interests at heart.