DID THE UNICORN JUST JUMP THE SHARK?

Obama's Olympic Failure Will Test the Washington Press Corps (Fred Barnes, 10/02/09, Weekly Standard)

Now is the time for the mainstream media to show it’s not totally in President Obama’s pocket. The Washington press corps will never fault Obama for pushing hyper-liberal policies in a moderate-to-conservative country. Ideological criticism by the press is reserved for Republican presidents.

But the media is faced with three facts as a result of Obama’s embarrassing failure in Copenhagen. 1) The failure itself. 2) The incompetence. 3) The lack of persuasive ability. There’s nothing ideological about any of these items.

The scary thing for the White House is that the media is passing the Barnes Test:
For Obama, an Unsuccessful Campaign (PETER BAKER, 10/03/09, NY Times)

President Obama not only failed to bring home the gold, he could not even muster the silver or bronze.

A dramatic 20-hour mission across the ocean to persuade the International Olympic Committee to give the 2016 Summer Games to Chicago proved such a miscalculation that his adopted hometown finished fourth of four candidate cities.

Rarely has a president put his credibility on the line on the world stage in such a personal way and been slapped down so sharply in real time. [...]

His decision to become the first president to lobby the Olympic committee in person, just two weeks after saying he was too busy with health care legislation, was a risky gamble from the start. It was predicated on the theory that Mr. Obama’s star power overseas — “the best brand in the world,” as his advisers have put it — was luminescent enough to sway enough committee members to make the difference.

The agony of Obama's defeat (JOSH GERSTEIN, 10/2/09, Politico)

ven before Air Force One made it back to Andrews, political finger-pointing broke out. White House officials insisted that Obama decided to go only after very aggressive lobbying from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who offered assurances that the city’s bid was within striking distance of winning.

Many political pros said they wouldn’t even consider letting Obama put his prestige, popularity and time on the line to go to Copenhagen unless he thought Chicago was a lock, or a near-lock. Some even speculated that Obama must have had some inside information about the strength of Chicago’s bid that prompted him to go – something the White House denied.

But at least one Olympics expert said that if the White House aides truly believed Daley’s assurances, they were simply naïve.

“Obama and his advisers have proven to be less smart post-campaign than in the campaign,” said John Hoberman, a University of Texas professor who studies the International Olympic Committee. “The specter of a smart politician like Obama walking into this is not pretty."

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 2, 2009 6:18 PM