Charles Krauthammer details Obama’s health-care reform collapse, culminating in his “disastrous summer.” Krauthammer cautions that Obama “will likely regroup and pass some version of health insurance reform that will restore some of his clout and popularity.” But something has been lost along the way, besides support for the public option:

What has occurred — irreversibly — is this: He’s become ordinary. The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He’s regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.

For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform — and his own standing — with yet another prime-time speech.

But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises — mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama’s supreme self-regard may never adapt.

Stripped of his aura, Obama may be in for a rough time. He lacks innovative policy ideas, preferring overstuffed statist programs. He does not have the legislative dealmaker skills of an LBJ. And one doubts he has the ability to craft cagey compromises like Bill Clinton. So if he’s not a “sort of God,” what is he? An ultra-liberal with a remote if not icy persona — and a mound of debt. And that’s not a formula for success.

But Krauthammer is right not to count Obama out, at least not now. A lot of people made that mistake about conservatives, who were declared to be in permanent exile after the 2008 election. (Once again, we relearn the lesson that the key to politics is waiting for the other guys to mess up, overreach, and self-destruct.) The aura may be gone, but Obama still has many assets at his disposal, including huge majorities in the House and Senate. Let’s see what he can do with them now that the magic is gone.