Debates Show How Much Obama’s Presidency Has Shrunk

What ever happened to Barack Obama?

For a while there, no modern figure was supposed to be as consequential. It’s difficult to describe the hype in the early days of the Obama era. Time, Newsweek, and countless deep thinkers cast him as a 21st-century Lincoln or FDR. Some literally saw a messianic figure — “The One,” in Oprah Winfrey’s words. Self-help guru Deepak Chopra said Obama represented a “quantum leap in American consciousness.”

George Lucas speculated that he might even be a Jedi.

It was a global phenomenon. In a...