Instead of the transformational leader whose intellect and charm could change the course of history, Barack Obama's anti-climactic visit to Denmark has shown him to be a bit of a wet firecracker.
It's a lucky thing for Mr. Obama, then, that almost no one who matters was watching the Copenhagen summit. Americans have shown about as much interest in the climate talks as they have in global warming.
To the chagrin of the earnest Europeans and angst-ridden Maldivians, climate change has actually been sliding lower from its already near-bottom rung on American voters' ladder of priorities. Few Americans will bemoan their President's flagrant failure to woo the world into adopting stiff and enforceable measures to reduce greenhouse gases.
"It was never a very high priority in the U.S.," noted Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "But combined with a weak economy and the realization that there is no cheap way of substantially reducing emissions, it will be an even lower one in 2010 than it was in 2009."
The unkindest cut, however, came from American progressives, for whom Mr. Obama's compromises on health-care reform and Afghanistan have already been hard to swallow, if not tantamount to betrayal.
In a blog entry entitled "Copenhagen and the end of naiveté," Cascadia Brian of the youth environmental group It's Getting Hot in Here characterized Mr. Obama's rosy depiction of the Copenhagen agreement as "a complete dishonesty."
Others were more forgiving: "The outcome announced by President Obama is weaker than many people were hoping for, but that is primarily because expectations had become unrealistic," said Michael Levi, who leads the program on energy security and climate change at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
Mr. Lieberman, in an interview from Copenhagen, added: "There isn't much point to promising abroad what can't be delivered at home."
Indeed, the decision of the White House to forego investing a gram of political capital into getting climate change legislation through Congress before the Copenhagen meeting cast a cloud over the summit from the start. If candidate Obama was unequivocal in his tough stand on climate-change legislation, President Obama has - as on most other issues - been harder to pin down.
That has allowed those with more defined positions to occupy the political vacuum. Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and the party's climate change denier-in-chief, made a cameo appearance in Copenhagen to insist "the science [of global warming]has been completely debunked" and place the odds of legislation getting through Congress at exactly "zero."
More and more Americans agree. The Climategate affair, in which some leading scientists apparently held back data that did not corroborate their global-warming hypothesis, has received much more U.S. media attention of late than melting ice caps. It is likely one reason why the proportion of Americans joining the ranks of climate change skeptics has soared.
If Mr. Obama had a chance to push for Senate action earlier this year - he had window of opportunity after the House of Representatives adopted a relatively tough climate-change bill in June - he has almost certainly lost it now. With a third of senators and all 435 House members facing the voters in November, domestic priorities - read jobs - will overtake everything else.
Heading into the campaign, Republicans can claim credit for having stopped a "jobs-killing" climate-change bill while portraying Mr. Obama's lack of influence with Chinese leaders in Copenhagen as proof of the President's weakness. His deferential stand toward the United States' biggest creditor - on display during Mr. Obama's trip to China last month - already had the right calling him a pushover in Beijing's eyes.
If Republicans get satisfaction out Mr. Obama's failures, the President's core supporters are downright depressed.
The health-care bill that the Senate may or may not pass before Christmas is seen by them as an utter capitulation on the part of the White House that will only enrich an anti-competitive U.S. insurance industry. On Afghanistan, the President has entangled his country further in a morally ambiguous conflict abroad. And in Copenhagen, he chose spin over substance on an issue the wide-eyed voters who turned out in droves for Mr. Obama a year ago considered gravely important.
Is that a problem? Most Americans support the troop surge in Afghanistan, are against major health-care reform and don't want the U.S. to commit to slashing greenhouse gases without a promise of matching cuts from China and India.
Maybe being less-than-transformational is all most of America really wants from its President right now.
Konrad Yakabuski