Posted by
Bill Crawford on Friday, October 02, 2009 2:29:50 PM
The Obamaite wet dream has ended. They were so hoping for a world forum here in 2016 that Barrack and Michelle could preside over in the last year of his second term. What a glorious and expensive coronation it would have been.
I'm not really with the critics who panned him for jetting to Copenhagen- they would have done better for themselves, I think, if they stuck to the most salient reason- Obama is starting to suffer a national security credibility problem, made worse with the news that he has been on national TV for health care about five dozen times as many as his conferences with the Afghan theater General who has been asking for more troops for months now.
Obama did not lose the Olympics, though. The United States has an inherent disadvantage when it presents to the IOC an American city Olympic budget, competeing with countries. Rio, like China, can build whatever it wants for the games and whatever residents are in the area will scoot to elsewhere with nary a thought about eminent domain and "I need a lawyer". They also laid out a budget proposal that outspent Chicago by a factor of four. Money talks as well in South America as it does here.
I think the other reason is that, like almost four billion other residents of the planet, the IOC hotel had TV sets that carried two tidbits from Chicago newsfeeds: a poll showing that almost half the local residents expressed a desire for having nothing to do with the Olympics and two, the tragic video of an honor student getting fatally beaten by thugs with railroad ties. Someone from China should talk to Mayor Daley about keeping the streets quiet when you need to. Then again, his elder tried to do that at the 1968 Democrat convention, and look how THAT turned out.