I am from Chicago (well, a suburb), and I am delighted that Chicago didn’t get the games. The city’s got enough problems already and doesn’t need the traffic congestion, the expense (as others have pointed out, the games tend to be money-losers), or the corrupt officials lining their pockets. Let Rio have them; I understand it’s a beautiful city, and it’s the first time South America has hosted.
Obama’s whole trip over there to shill for his buddy Mayor Daley just has me shaking my head in disbelief. It’s one of those things that makes me wonder just WTF he was possibly thinking. This is not the job of the President. Particularly at a time when the economy is tanking, Iran is acting up, and the war in Afghanistan is heading toward a crisis. As someone up thread said, if you have to send *someone* send the First Lady: this kind of symbolic gesture is exactly in her arena. But the President has about a million more important things to do and perhaps he should actually try and spend his time on some of them.
However, as has *also* been pointed out, if he really, really couldn’t fight the temptation to appear and let the world bask in his glow, he shouldn’t have shown up unless he was certain the fix was in. It’s irresponsible for the President to waste his time in this fashion, but inexcusable that he should waste so much time (and money) to bring home nothing. He invested time, money and prestige for a net result of … zero.
And it’s *that* that worries me more than anything else.n Not the loss of the games itself (as I said earlier, Rio getting them is fine by me), but what this whole thing says about Obama. Because what it says to me is that he has no understanding of what the proper role of the president is, no understanding of where he should be focusing his efforts, and no way to estimate if the efforts he is putting in will bring back a reasonable return. Needless to say, these are all very, very bad traits for a president to have.
I didn’t vote for Obama, but when he was first elected I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and allow some time for a learning curve. But for crying out loud, he’s been in office for nine months now. Shouldn’t some actual, you know, *learning* be taking place? In a year’s time, probably nobody will even remember that Obama lost the Olympics to Rio. But will Obama himself still be the same bumbling incompetent that he appears to be now? I sincerely hope not, for the good of the nation. But I’m not hopeful.
