We have, as Bill Maher might say, a new rule: If something is bad for Barack Obama, it must be good for America, even if it’s actually, well, bad for America.
OK, that may not be everyone’s rule. But it’s a rule, apparently, for many in what we’ll call the you-lie wing of American conservatives.
I don’t know what else to think. As you may have heard, Chicago, Obama’s adopted hometown, didn’t get the 2016 Olympics. It wasn’t runner-up. It didn’t even get the third-place bronze. As one approving blog poster put it, Chicago got the flowers. And Obama got bupkis.
Finishing fourth in a four-city competition in Copenhagen was, of course, an international humiliation, made more humiliating by the fact that Obama had put his prestige on the line by flying to Copenhagen. Words, apparently, didn’t matter. Maybe Chicago should have tried bribery. It’s worked before.
There are ways to spin this other than a giant miscalculation, even though that’s exactly what it was. You could note, for instance, that the Olympics are promoted as a set of lofty ideals, when, in fact, the real ideal is to land a giant TV contract and find a place you can erect another Bud Light Pavilion, hard by, say, Coca-Cola City.
Or you could do what the White House is trying to do, which is to effectively cite the adage that it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. It’s a nice idea, but check when Vince Lombardi famously said (or was famously misquoted as saying) that winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
I prefer David Mamet’s take from “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the play/movie about sleazy real estate deals. The Alec Baldwin character delivers a message from owners Mitch and Murray, telling the salesmen what matters is as easy as ABC — Always Be Closing. The best closer wins a Cadillac. No. 2 gets steak knives. Everyone else gets fired.
Obama, you might note, didn’t close the deal, leaving some to wonder now whether he can close the deal on health care or on cap and trade. It’s not hard to see how some conservatives are rooting.
On Hotline On Call, you can find a video of an Arlington, Va., meeting of Americans for Prosperity, a group that helped organize the tea-party protests. When the announcement was made of Chicago’s loss, some people immediately start clapping. When they hear it was a first-round defeat, there was applause and high-fiving. I kept waiting for someone to break out the party hats. You can guess which party it wouldn’t be.
Or you could have checked out a post on the Weekly Standard website that was headlined “Chicago Loses! Chicago Loses!” The John McCormick blog said that when news came of Chicago’s loss, staffers cheered.
By the way, an amended post dropped the exclamation points — always a good idea, by the way — in the headline and also the mention of cheering staffers.
McCormick wrote a new blog saying he wasn’t rooting against Chicago — only Obama’s “cowboy diplomacy.” Rooting against America apparently has some limits.
For Obama, this was an unforced error. Why would he have gone to Copenhagen unless he thought he was going to pull out a win? I’m wondering who’s the Obama czar for IOC vote-counting.
Personally, I was rooting for Rio. Chicago’s a great city, but this is a truly meaningful event for a country like Brazil and for the entire continent. I was worried, though, that rooting for Rio might seem un-American, if not, well, un-South American. But then I saw a clip — via Huffington Post — of the not-exactly-svelte Bill Bennett, the Bush Senior drug czar, saying on CNN he favored Rio because “in Rio, it’s beautiful women at the beach, and in Chicago, it’s fat people eating.”
In Colorado — a very thin state — we have some experience in rooting against the Olympics. Colorado, you’ll recall, had won the bid for the ’76 Winter Olympics. But Dick Lamm led the charge to put the idea to a vote, and the vote against paying for any part of the Olympics with tax money was overwhelming.
And so the Olympics went to Innsbruck and Lamm went on to be a three-term governor.
Now, Bill Ritter and John Hickenlooper — flush from the Democratic Convention success — want to bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, as if there’s a statute of limitations on having rejected the Olympics.
I got hold of Lamm to ask him, in an e-mail exchange, what he thought of the Olympics coming to Colorado.
He said the jump in TV revenue made it now possible to make money. And while he still has environmental concerns, Colorado grew without the help of what is basically a TV love letter to the host city.
“I am skeptical but open,” Lamm says. “I think Colorado voters did the right thing in 1972, but that was then. I have done the Olympics enough damage — at least for now.
“But bottom line? I agree that the IOC is likely to have a long memory.”
That may be bad for Colorado. We won’t know until we figure out whether it’s bad for Obama.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
