The "Peter Principle" morphs into the "Obama Principle."

...the trip [to Copenhagen for the Olympic bid] illustrates perfectly why the president is a premier example of the Peter Principle.

"The Peter Principle is the principle that "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence." It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous treatise which also introduced the "salutary science of Hierarchiology", "inadvertently founded" by Peter. ...

The Peter Principle is a special case of a ubiquitous observation: anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails.

By the historical standards of the office, Barack Obama is certainly at a level far above his level of incompetency. A reader emailed Glenn Reynolds,

Just can’t get my head around this. So many foolish things about it, and here’s one more: Obama did this on a Friday, ensuring that the Sunday news talk shows discuss nothing else. The only world in which this makes a lick of sense is if he’s trying to distract from the horrible unemployment, the deteriorating Afghanistan situation, a Nuclear Iran, the Public Option failure…

To which Glenn observed, "Well, when your great PR coup is to change which of your failures is the subject of conversation, it’s not a great sign."

Even the New York Times (!) is on it:

Losing out on the Olympics, of course, is not the sort of war-and-peace issue that defines a presidency, and the embarrassment will presumably fade in a news cycle or two. But it provides fodder for critics who are already using it as a metaphor for a president who, in their view, focuses on the wrong priorities and overestimates his capacity to persuade the world to follow his lead.

But that is what Peter Principle people do!

As others have exhaustively pointed out, there is nothing at all in Obama's resume that shows he ever made highly difficult decisions that depended, at the end, on his own personal reservoir of wisdom and experience. So he does not tackle the inbox because its contents are above his competence. (One is reminded of Obama telling Rick Warren that when an unborn child gets human rights is "above my pay grade.") He tends instead to lesser matters that match his lower level of competence and gratifyingly feed the ego. And so he flies to Copenhagen to deliver a speech of no significance on a matter of no consequence. Why? Because he can do that - simply standing in front of a crowd reading eloquently from a teleprompter he can handle quite well.

And it gets him front and center in the international media. It's a twofer.

We have a long three years ahead. As The New Republic's James Kirchick wrote in the NY Post, "We need a leader, not a prom king."