An Olympic failure

As I wrote last week, and as so many others have opined, the President was remiss in going to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics. Making such a high-profile appeal made the exercise highly political and forced opponents and supporters of both the President and of bringing the games to Chicago to approach this as having more at stake than would have been the case had the President not broken new ground here. No previous American president has taken such a personal approach, though this is not unheard of from the heads of lesser countries. In normal diplomatic matters, the President does not meet his foreign counterpart until the lower-level contacts have produced an agreement that the heads of state merely ratify. That’s why Obama’s campaign promise to sit down without preconditions to talk with the axis of anti-American tyrants raised so many eyebrows and signaled to all the candidate’s naivete or hubris.

Chicago’s bid might have failed, regardless of the President’s efforts. But by going all in, Obama insured that the Olympic Committee’s rebuff rubs off on him, as the writers at The New York Times recognize, to their credit. I do not believe that Obama helped or hurt the city’s efforts. These matters are not decided by having the Obamas appear, Oprah Winfrey in tow, to make a rather emotional and predictably self-centered appeal (on that last point, listen to the George Will snippet in a link, below). But that is precisely why this was such a fool’s errand. The office of the President has been diminished by his having paid attention to matters not suited to the position. He himself has been diminished by the snub to Chicago of losing big in the first round, a result that appears to have taken them by surprise.

At the very least, Obama’s and the administration’s overconfidence before the vote shows political incompetence of the sort that led him to make projections about the economy and his ability to implement policies that have fallen far short of his promises. At worst, it shows an arrogance about his abilities to show up and, through emotional speeches, change the course of nature, as well as human nature. He and David Axelrod may have thought that the Byzantine politics and Olympian corruption of the IOC would be manageable given their background in Cook County politics, but Obama’s excessive self-regard in that matter reminds one of the campaign speeches in which he messianically presented himself to the world as the one during whose reign the world would finally begin to heal itself and the oceans begin to subside. One next expected him to promise a new covenant between himself and the world.

After an initial burst of honest disappointment at their failure, Obama’s acolytes in the media have quickly begun to spin the story in multiple new directions. All done to avoid the personal political cost that comes from such an overt injection of personal politics into the process. Had Chicago been awarded the games, as many in the administration apparently believed, Obama and his supporters would have trumpeted his personal powers of persuasion as the single most important factor. In a strange turn-about, success would have had one father; now, failure has many potential fathers, all but The One. Among the weirdest assertions has been that the Copenhagen fiasco must be blamed on George W. Bush, because hostility to him is still causing other countries to shun the U.S. This smear conveniently forgets, of course, that Chicago was chosen as a finalist when the despised Bush was still President. As a link within the above link shows, at least some of the IOC members were put off by what they saw as Obama’s arrogance, though that also seems to be due to an affliction of an oversized ego from which these Olympicrats suffer.

Another tactic among Obama defenders is to accuse the Republicans as being, what else, un-American and unpatriotic for being glad that Obama failed. As if the point here is to be glad that he failed, rather than that he was warned against foolishly meddling in the matter. The media and other Obama defenders choose to forget that these were the same criticisms that Obama and his campaign made against John McCain last fall when McCain suspended his campaign to return to Washington to participate in the TARP debate.And that was a considerably more deserving matter than the Olympic Games of having Obama (who stayed away from the Senate yet again) participate directly. One might almost think that the financial benefit to Axelrod’s firm and to other Obama contributors and supporters was motivating the White House’s futile full-court press in favor of the Chicago bid.

If Obama cannot succeed on such a comparatively minor matter when he puts the presidency’s prestige on the line, will this tell him something about the likely reception he is going to get in Tehran or Pyongyang? Contrary to Obama’s sports analogy, any do-overs you get are going to be much more difficult. International diplomacy is a game of perceptions, and one perceives that the perceptive foreign perceiver’s perceptions of American diplomatic prowess are not going to be enhanced.

You know that a liberal politician is in serious political trouble when the folks at Saturday Night Live lampoon him rather mercilessly. That is something normally reserved for Republicans. Criticism of the entertainment industry’s favorite liberal is usually muted, at least until a more favorite liberal comes along. See, the treatment of Hillary until Obama appeared. But this skit takes direct aim at the administration’s lack of accomplishments. Again, George W. Bush did not have any greater accomplishments as of, say, September 10, 2001, than does Obama at a similar point of his presidency. But Bush had a much more modest view of the President’s role in constitutional government and of the government in people’s lives than does the incumbent. Bush also did not come into office with the same fanfares of change and the boundless belief that he could just remake the United States, no, the world, by his ascension, as has been the relentless message of Obama and his supporters.