Obama's 'Spell is Broken'

President Obama's big-government dreams have turned him into a modern-day Icarus, Charles Krauthammer writes for the Washington Post. “His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth.” The magic is gone after “a disastrous summer” of “mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing.” Less than a year after his election, Obama is “ordinary.”

Obama fell from grace when he imagined “he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one's own image.” When his camp started calling opponents a “mob” and endangering trust with “fishy” answers, his fall was complete. As poll numbers show, “he's become ordinary. The spell is broken,” Krauthammer writes, “a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama's supreme self-regard may never adapt.” (More President Obama stories.)