That's a little like describing the Monica Lewinsky scandal as a blemish on Bill Clinton's reputation for marital fidelity. Yet while the premise that Barack Obama ever had a "reputation for effectiveness" is dubious, there has never been such broad agreement about his ineffectiveness--specifically, about the poor quality of government management under his presidency.
The VA scandal, observes CNN's Gloria Borger, "is just the latest in a slew of bureaucratic messes that strike at the core power point of the Obama presidency: Making government work":
Consider the disastrous health care website rollout. The IRS controversy. Even the question of NSA surveillance raises questions about the role of government: Did the civil libertarian Obama allow spies to run amok? . . .
Government is unwieldy and difficult and hard to tame, sure. But if your presidency is based, in large part, on telling Americans that government can work for them--which it can--you need to make it work.
Borger then offers this qualification:
It's not that the President is a hopeless manager. He does very well when he leads a hierarchical organization with a single goal, like a presidential bid. He's top dog, he's not negotiating with anybody, and he's not trying to get people to do things they don't want to do. In a campaign, for instance, they all want to elect the same person: him.
There's an unwarranted generalization here: There's no evidence that Obama is good at leading "a hierarchical organization with a single goal" if that goal is something other than the election (or perhaps the aggrandizement) of Barack Obama. But let's give Borger credit for delivering an artful backhanded compliment.
That said, what Borger delicately calls "the IRS controversy" was not a case of inept management but of the corrupt use of government power. Its purpose was the suppression of Obama's political opponents. To the extent that it accomplished this aim, Obama's re-election looks even less like a triumph of effective management.
Peggy Noonan, who has touched on this theme before, describes the president's problem as a "failure to understand that government isn't magic." That appears to be literally accurate. Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein report that Obama has resorted to apotropaic rituals. It started, they write, "last fall in the midst of the biggest humiliation of Barack Obama's presidency, the failure of the health care website":
Anytime he heard a sliver of good news, the president reacted the same way: He knocked on the polished cherry wood table in the Roosevelt Room.
It's a small thing, almost a nervous tic, but Obama's habit of knocking on wood during Obamacare meetings had become notable, something that close advisers talked and even joked about among themselves. . . .
When Obamacare fixer Jeffrey Zients told the president for the first time that the website would finally hold up under a rush of visitors, Obama joined his senior aides in a round of knocking. When the insurance marketplace finally functioned as it should, they knocked. When enrollment numbers picked up in March, they knocked.
Even E.J. Dionne recognizes--albeit grudgingly and equivocally--that there's a problem here: "As a general matter, I wish Obama spent more time than he has on fixing government and improving administration. Progressives rightly assert that active, competent government can make things better--which means they need to place a high priority on making it work better."
There are echoes of Michael Dukakis in Borger's and Dionne's defensive insistence that, as he puts it, "progressives rightly assert . . . government can make things better." In his speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, Massachusetts' then-governor declared: "This election isn't about ideology; it's about competence." Dukakis had a reputation (deserved or not) as an effective technocrat, and he wanted voters to focus on that, not on his well-left-of-center views.

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Obama's newfound critics worry that his poor management is, as Noonan puts it, "undercutting what he stands for, the progressive project that says the federal government is the primary answer to the nation's ills." As in Dukakis's case, their defensiveness serves to call attention to that vulnerability.
Of course a candidate is a package deal; one couldn't vote for Dukakis's skill set and against his view of the world. In contrast, it is at least logically possible that the progressive project is a worthy and feasible enterprise but Obama is the wrong man to lead its execution. Borger and Dionne don't put it quite that starkly, but that is where their thinking leads.
It also raises the question: Who would be the right man? Few progressives would credit George W. Bush with managerial competence. Thus by Borger's and Dionne's logic, a necessary condition for the success of the progressive project would be the election of a president considerably more competent than anyone who has made it to the White House in at least two decades--and not just one president but an unbroken series of them, since things could go quickly wrong under a single subpar administration.
Ezra Klein suggests even that wouldn't be enough. The Vox.com editor has a 12-point analysis titled "Obama's Management Problem." His fourth point runs counter to the idea that the difficulty is as simple as incompetence at the top:
4. Some of this goes to how the federal government is structured. The various agencies are staffed by civil servants who the president has fairly little power over. But they're led by political appointees who the president often knows well and trusts deeply. The result can be that rather than blaming political appointees responsible for the failures of the bureaucracies they run White Houses sometimes blame bureaucracies for the failures of their political appointees.
If Klein is right to find fault with the structure of the federal government, then the federal government in its current form cannot be "the primary answer to the nation's ills." Fundamental restructuring of the federal government is another necessary condition for progressivism's success.
To agree that these are necessary conditions is not to establish that they would be sufficient ones. But that's an abstract point. If progressivism cannot succeed absent these two exceedingly unlikely contingencies, it is as well to say it cannot succeed. The problem is ideology, not just competence.