Obama’s Olympic Moment

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September 29, 2009, 6:33 pm

By Eric Etheridge

President Obama announced yesterday that he would go to Copenhagen at the end of the week to plead Chicago’s case for the 2016 Summer Olympics. And just like that, the Olympics became blogger fodder.

Most of the action has been on the right, where commentators have put the White House’s Olympian effort to use in a variety of ways. At Commentary, Jennifer Rubin sees the trip as just another effort on the president’s part to avoid having to make any tough decisions: “Obama is going to plead his case for the 2016 Olympics — because he can’t imagine any better use of his time, one supposes.”

In the swarm of speeches, pronouncements, legislative gambits (how’s cap-and-trade doing these days?), and endless appearances, Obama has become omnipresent but ineffectual. He talks about everything but accomplishes virtually nothing. He has a single domestic “achievement”— a failed stimulus plan. His foreign policy is in disarray. Maybe he is everywhere on TV because that’s what he knows how to do — with no follow-through, hard decision-making, or consensus-building required. If he didn’t do all that TV, he might have to govern.

At the Weekly Standard, Jonathan V. Last says that president’s trip will provide us with a “clear data point” on the effectiveness of Obama’s use of “smart power” — or “iPower,” as Last calls it — in his foreign policy.

Either the IOC will give the Olympics to Chicago, as Obama will ask them to, of they will not. The question is, what happens if they don’t?

If Obama’s iPower isn’t enough to convince the IOC to render a trivial decision that is utterly painless to them, then why should anyone believe that he can coax a hostile regime to take actions they deem contrary to their self-interest?

Last colleague’s Jonathan Goldfarb is worried that Obama and Chicago might actually prevail. That would be bad, he says, because it risks damaging our relationship with Brazil, another 2016 contestant:

So far unremarked upon in Obama’s about face in deciding to go to Copenhagen to press for Chicago’s Olympic bid is the potential fallout for U.S. relations with Brazil. Brazil is an emerging regional power (one of the BRIC countries), and critical for efforts to balance the subversive leftism of Chavez and his ilk with the electorally-based leftism of President Lula. Brazil, the most populous country in South America, is important for the U.S. over a wide range of issues–energy (nearly self-sufficient in ethanol), economics, environment, and security. By virtually all accounts, Chicago and Rio de Janeiro are the finalists for the 2016 Olympics. South America has never hosted an Olympics and there is huge national and regional pride behind Brazil’s bid. President Lula himself is going to Copenhagen and has been heavily involved in making the case for 2016.

By deciding to personally intervene on behalf of the Chicago machine’s Olympic bid, if successful, Obama threatens to damage a critical relationship in Latin America. I doubt if Lula and 200 million Brazilians would be too pleased if the Yankee colossus derailed their Olympic bid at the last minute.

In a third post on the Weekly Standard blog on the issue, William Kristol offers the theory that the trip is but a ruse to get the president close enough to Afghanistan so he can make a surprise visit there:

The president and his advisers must realize, in Mark McKinnon’s words, that “people elected Obama to be president — not the head of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce,” that a large part of being president is being commander-in-chief, and that it’s not good that Obama appears to have plenty of time for everything — David Letterman, Democratic fundraisers, Olympics-lobbying jaunts — except Afghanistan, just as he’s about to decide whether to commit tens of thousands more troops there. In addition, Obama’s never been to Afghanistan as president, and — we now know — apparently has spoken to General Stanley McChrystal only once by video-teleconference since McChrystal assumed command there.

David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel aren’t stupid: Expect to see Barack Obama get on the plane after his session with the International Olympics Committee at mid-day Friday Copenhagen time, and be in Afghanistan with our troops five hours later, in time for the evening news Friday here in the U.S.

At National Review, both Jim Geraghty and Ramesh Ponruru see a different ruse: If the president is going, then Chicago already has the games in hand. Ponnuru writes:

Some people seem to think that the president is taking time away from more important things to go to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago to get the 2016 games. They’re wrong. He is taking time away from more important things to go get the credit for bringing the Olympics to Chicago. Does anyone seriously believe that the president would take a quick trip to Copenhagen with the possibility of coming back empty-handed? If the president is going, it’s because he knows that Chicago has already won. He’s going.

There’s not so much love for the president’s move on the other side of the aisle, though lefty responses lack the dramatic flair of their counterparts. At the New Republic, Jason Zengerle lists three reasons he doesn’t like the trip. Like some above, Zengerle doesn’t care for the “optics” of the president jetting off to Copenhagen what with the fights for health care and Afghanistan needing his attention. He also wonders what the upside is if Chicago takes the prize:

Well, to quote one-time U.S. men’s basketball national team member Derrick Coleman, “Whoop-dee-damn-do.” Sure, people in Chicago will be happy, but will anybody in the rest of the country care? I certainly don’t remember much dancing in the streets of anywhere other than Atlanta and Salt Lake City when those two cities locked down their Olympic bids.

His third reason: “What’s the point of hosting the Olympics anyway?”

There’s plenty of reasons to doubt the supposed economic benefits of hosting the games. (Just go take a stroll around Atlanta’s Centennial Park if you doubt these sorts of studies.) And while I’m sure Obama would enjoy using the 2016 games in his adopted city as a sort of victory lap at the end of what would be his second term, he first has to win that second term. I think health care reform and the war in Afghanistan are going to be a lot more determinative on that count than the I.O.C.

That last point is especially popular among the wonky set. “Hosting the Olympics is like building a regional sports stadium, writes John Robb. “A few people benefit but almost everyone else is worse off for the experience.”

“Is there any reason to think these events are actually beneficial?,” asks Matthew Yglesias.

The main sense in which you can imagine a city being made better off by hosting an Olympics is that the hosting duties may cause it to invest in some useful infrastructure that pays off. But if that’s the case the infrastructure investments would have paid off even if there had been no Olympics. The name of the game is to identify useful infrastructure opportunities and build what’s worth building. If anything, pegging the investments to a one-off multination sporting event seems likely to cloud thinking about what is and isn’t truly needed.

At his blog The Bellows, Ryan Avent counters Ygelsias, saying, “Sure, in an ideal world leaders would evaluate infrastructure needs and build the things that are worth building, but as Matt well knows, we don’t live in an ideal world.”

The Olympics can help to align the interests of fractious local governments and increase public acceptance of tax increases. And it can fix the time problem of infrastructure investment. Infrastructure benefits begin appearing years down the road and last for decades beyond that, while many of the costs — the political headaches, the need to put together financing, the disruption of construction, and so on — are relatively immediate. Winning the Olympics ties an immediate benefit to the immediate costs — we’re facing all these headaches, but it’s worth it because we won the Olympics. The games give a short-sighted electorate a reason to invest for the long-run.