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And so it came to pass that Barack Obama, like Kipling’s “Emperor” Daniel Dravot, was bitten, bloodied and forsaken. If you’ve read “The Man Who Would Be King” or seen the film, you know how it ends: Dravot, self-proclaimed divinity and King of Kafiristan, alone upon a rope bridge dangling across a deep ravine. “’Cut you beggars,’ he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and round and round, twenty thousand miles.”

Fate will be relatively kinder to Mr. Obama, in part because the priestly liberal class of Olbermann, Matthews and Maddow aren’t as bloody-minded, in part, too, because Americans usually forgive even their worst ex-presidents as a way atoning for their own electoral mistakes. But politically, Mr. Obama’s presidency is tracing the same downward spiral. Kipling’s tale helps explain why.

The explanation is that “miracles”—or rather, the unprecedented, the unexpected and the misreported—only happen once. Dravot and his sidekick Peachey Carnehan, two raffish ex-soldiers of the British Raj, alight on the insane idea of setting themselves up as kings in a primitive corner of Afghanistan. Except the idea isn’t quite insane, and the very belief that it is makes it that much easier to carry off. As Carnehan says, “If you could think us a little more mad we would be more pleased.”

And so, with a small consignment of rifles and a considerable amount of gumption, the pair set off for their kingdom-to-be. So it was, too, with Mr. Obama, who made improbability itself—his parents’ “improbable love”; his own “improbable journey”; America’s “improbable hope”—a centerpiece of his candidacy. “There is improbability in the making of any president, some more than others, none comparable to Obama,” gushed journalist David Maraniss in the Washington Post a few days before Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

Yet Mr. Obama never would have come near the White House had his story been any more probable. It was “improbability” that allowed him first to sneak past Hillary Clinton in Iowa, then to ride along on the impression that he was capable of miracles. “The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder,” wrote skeptical philosopher David Hume. Such were the people donning the T-shirts with Shepard Fairey’s formerly iconic portrait of Obama, circa October 2008.

Here, however, is where the trouble begins: in the anticipation of the follow-on miracles, and in the vanity that public adulation usually produces. In Kipling’s story, Dravot and Carnehan are taken to be gods and therefore, according to local belief, bloodless. But Dravot demands a bride—proving, before she even bites him, that he isn’t. It doesn’t much matter that as political leaders he and Carnehan are fairly successful, subduing local enemies and providing a measure of justice. Gods are held to a different standard.

Just so in what was once the cult of Barack Obama. He was supposed to stand above partisan politics as the ultimate uniter. He was supposed to eschew the temptations of executive privilege and authority, as a believer in the sanctity of constitutional principle. He was supposed to make America beloved again in the world, as the embodiment of a biracial, transcultural identity. He was supposed to make the oceans recede and the planet heal, as a champion of environmental good sense.

No mortal politician would have been expected to fulfill even a fraction of these promises, and by that measure Mr. Obama has not disappointed. But it says something about the expectations Mr. Obama once evoked that he should now be politically crucified on his Cross of Hope.

It also says something about Mr. Obama’s own political miscalculations. “If after seeing us as long as they had, they still believed we were Gods, it wasn’t for me to undeceive them,” reasons Carnehan on the eve of his downfall. Perhaps a similar thought went through Mr. Obama’s mind when, for instance, he decided to accept a Nobel Peace Prize he would have been wiser to turn down. Vanity got the better of him.

In “Politics as a Vocation,” the German sociologist Max Weber observed that “ultimately there are only two kinds of deadly sins in the field of politics: lack of objectivity and—often but not always identical with it—irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins.”

Standing in the foreground has been the story of Mr. Obama’s political career. When its history is written, the marvel will be how quickly he seduced a nation, and how quickly he lost it. There’s really no marvel at all. He is, or was, the man who would be king.