Topic: Decline of the West
Barack Obama's Olympic humiliation in Copenhagen was remarkable in two respects: that an American president would put his prestige on the line over such a trivial issue, and that he and his advisers so thoroughly miscalled the play. So far as one can tell from the outside, the White House actually believed that the selection of Chicago was in the bag. Precisely how they managed to persuade themselves of this non-fact is an open question, but their poor judgment resulted in a major embarrassment.
Moreover, this was a self-inflicted wound. Obama could very easily have held himself aloof from Chicago's Olympic bid. He is, after all, the president of the United States. There are many other issues, far more important, on his agenda—issues with a priority claim on his limited time. To expend time and energy on his home town's Olympic hopes was a startling example of poor judgment from a president whose intelligence and political skills have been so highly touted. Fred Barnes puts it well in this blog post for the Weekly Standard:
[W]here was the charisma, the skill in persuading people to see things Obama’s way? The media has built Obama up as a communicator who’s the equal of Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt. True, he’s delivered several fine speeches, but all of them before he became president. Now he’s either lost his touch or never was the orator the press said he was.
Obama's claque will argue that the fiasco in Copenhagen, was, after all, a minor setback. That Chicago has failed to land the Olympics is hardly a world-historical catastrophe. That much is true. But still, it tells us something about the man and his administration that isn't very reassuring—particularly to fathers like me whose sons and daughters are serving in the armed forces. So Obama got Copenhagen wrong, but we can trust him to get Afghanistan right? That's a profession of faith that I simply cannot bring myself to make.
