Yes, President Obama will be heading a delegation, which includes his wife Michelle and Oprah Winfrey, to Copenhagen tomorrow to lobby the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to award the 2016 Summer Games to Chicago.
And, since nothing (usually) inspires national pride and camaraderie quite like the quest to host the Olympics, one would’ve have thought all Americans would be rooting for Obama to succeed. Yet this is not so.
Instead, Obama’s political agenda (highlighted by his push for health care reform) has incited such irrational and fractious partisanship that Republicans are reacting as if he were flying off to Iran to appease Ahmadinejad on nuclear weapons. There’s no denying, though, that this reaction is suffused with racism – as no less a person than President Carter has lamented.
But arguing that Obama is neglecting his duties as president by going to Copenhagen to lobby for the 2016 Games is as patently contrived as arguing that President Bush neglected his by going to Beijing to attend the 2008 Games. After all, it is axiomatic in this age of technology that anything the president does in the Oval Office can be done from Air Force One (or any hotel room).
Not to mention that it smacks of arbitrary consciousness to accuse Obama of hypocrisy for taking his presidential retinue all the way over there for just a few hours of schmoozing given the carbon footprint involved….
Therefore, I applaud him for embracing the Olympic spirit by joining heads of state from Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), Spain (Madrid) and Japan (Tokyo) to compete for this national honor. Especially since this furthers his goal of re-casting the US as a nation that acts collegially, not as a domineering superpower, in the international community.
I see really no favorite. I think it’s going to be a very close vote. I think the final vote will be decided by a couple of votes only.
(IOC president Jacques Rogge)
The 100-plus members of the IOC will vote in a secret ballot for the winner on Friday. And Obama had better hope that his delegation has done enough “persuading” to ensure that he is not putting his presidential gravitas (and Oprah’s celebrity) on the line in vain….
After all, losing this bid will only imbue the vacuous contempt so many have for him with (some) just cause….
That said, I don’t mind disclosing that I’m rooting for Brazil.
We want to prove that the time of this country being treated like a second-class citizen has ended. We want to be treated like first-class citizens.
Here in Latin America, all our lives we’ve had to prove that we know how to do things. The global crisis has unveiled the mask of many and shown the truth.
(Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva)
Hear, hear; good luck Lula!
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Pres. Carter says whites resent Obama…
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