Obama's Olympic Lobbying Trip Is Useless Gamble

Aside from showing love for his adopted hometown, President Obama’s decision to go to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago as host of the 2016 Summer Olympics is drawing a chorus of boos from the punditocracy as a gamble that could be embarrassing at best—what if, say, Brazil gets the Games instead, Matthew Cooper wonders—and truly detrimental to the US at worst.

• “He’s got health care, Afghanistan, Iraq, the deficit, the economy, Gitmo, education and a long list of other issues,” William McKenzie blogs for the Dallas Morning News. “Now, he wants to fly to Denmark to argue for the Olympics in Chicago … like Gary Cooper coming into town, doing what no one else has ever been able to do”?
• Adds Steve Chapman in the hometown Tribune: “Neither the future of our nation nor the success of his presidency will be much affected if Chicago does or doesn’t get the 2016 Games. But both depend on other issues that his trip to Denmark will divert him from. To let himself be distracted by a parochial concern like this does not speak well for Obama’s judgment.”

(More President Obama stories.)