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Notes -
More specifically, Obama tried to run / reorganize the government like a Chicago political machine, without the experience in federal-level and federal-system politics to understand why a federation with the continental scale of the United States can't run on the model of an city scale political machine, identarian or not.
There's a... I don't want to say 'reputation,' and I don't have a series of studies to point at either, so I'll just say a [reputation] of rising politicians who go from thriving in lower-level politics to tripping at higher levels because they go from being big fish in small ponds to working in an ocean of interests that aren't so easily corralled. In a city like Chicago, you can capture the local judiciary easily enough that extorting corporations to donate to your city machine supporters as a settlement deal is not only feasible, but self-reinforcing. At the federal level, there are too many established judges across too many jurisdictions with too many Congressional interest hooks to get institutional capture in a mere administration. Without that capture, such an effort becomes a destabilizing, rather than reinforcing, effort for security political primacy. Similar dynamics of inexperience played out in other Obama pushes, such as trying to push / pass the Iranian JPCOA as a purely executive authority fait accompli without bipartisan buildup.
The Obama administration did lean into identarian politics, both privately and publicly via media allies. And it did so in part because that was how Obama could displace and supersede the Clinton wing of the party, which had been the more egalitarian neoliberal political machine that replaced the prior, labor-based political machine that had tension with the Clintons and was neutered following things like the anti-WTO riots.
But the identarian versus neoliberal system friction was mostly internal party politics. The broader national political friction came from the new, inexperienced wing trying to apply a political machine model to a scale where it couldn't work, because they didn't have the relative primacy a political machine needs to operate with such impunity. While Obama himself was popular, the Democratic machine had already taken the drubbing as early as his first election, and even had Clinton won in 2016 she would have ended up in the White House with both the House and the Senate in Republican hands.
...isn't this just the Peter Principle as applied to politics?
Not quite. Peter Principle is the 'raise to your level of incompetence.' This is more of an inexperience issue, which is not the same thing.
Even competent people need time to adjust to new contexts and surroundings. Their ability to do so rapidly is the proof of their competence, but during that period they still make mistakes as they recalibrate expectations.
The point I am trying to make is that Obama was simply new to the federal government. When he won the presidency, he was still a first-term senator. He hadn't gone through a re-election cycle as a Senator to get a sense of how Congress persons needed to stay in touch with their constitutents (possibly part of why he was taken by surprise by the post-Obamacare shellacking), or the dynamics of the presidency changing parties as seen from others in Congress (and thus what a defeated former ruling party could still do as the minority opposition), and he never had experience on the key committees. There were a host of relevant experiences he never had, not because of competence but because of time.
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