Chicago Loses Olympics To Rio (What Was Obama Thinking?)
by LISA DONOVAN (excerpt)

CHICAGO SUN TIMES

COPENHAGEN — Chicago got the Olympic elimination blues handed to it in shocking fashion this morning — getting bumped out of the race in the first round as Rio de Janiero went on to win the Summer Games for 2016.

Many people had assumed Chicago would be a finalist. But International Olympic Committee members eliminated it only hours after Obama and his wife, Chicago native Michelle Obama, urged them to send the Summer Games to Obama’s adopted hometown. Obama had put his personal prestige on the line and his political capital at risk when he decided late in the competition to go to Copenhagen and make a personal appeal.

Chicago had seemed to pick up momentum in the last few days, with many IOC members seemingly charmed by Mrs. Obama, who came to Copenhagen ahead of her husband. But when IOC president Jacques Rogge announced the first vote’s results, while the Obamas were flying home on Air Force One, Chicago was out.

In making his pitch, the president had said that a nation shaped by the people of the world “wants a chance to inspire it once more.” Never before had a U.S. president made such an in-person appeal, and Obama’s critics will doubtlessly see the vote as a sign of his political shortcomings.