Was Obama wrong to campaign for the Olympics?
Following Chicago’s loss in the race for the 2016 Summer Olympics, criticism of the President for flying to Copenhagen to campaign for the city’s bid hit a fevered pitch. Some of the criticism was empirical, arguing that Obama’s presence would backfire: The IOC wouldn’t want to look like they gave it to Chicago just because Obama made a pitch. But most of the criticism was normative.
There were two major arguments. The first, which came exclusively from the left, stated that Chicago didn’t deserve to get the Olympics. Or more accurately, that other countries – most prominently Rio de Janeiro – deserved it more than the U.S. did. South America has never hosted an Olympic Games. The United States has hosted eight (four summer and four winter). The Olympics tend to be a cultural and (occasionally) economic boon, something South America could certainly use. Following the Bush Administration, the argument goes, America foreign policy should emphasize cooperation, not domination. Getting the Olympics again would send the wrong message to the world.
The second normative critique, made by those on both the right and the left, was that Obama has more important things on which to spend his time. Obama’s visit to Copenhagen coincided with the release of a dismal U.S. jobs report, health care reform continues to run into political hurdles and the war in Afghanistan seems to be going worse. The President should better choose his priorities and focus on problems facing Americans.
There are two responses to this critique. Obama delivered one, challenging the idea that hosting the Olympics should not be a priority by arguing that Chicago’s Olympics bid was a worthwhile cause for the President to champion: “I believe it’s always a worthwhile endeavor to promote and boost the United States of America and invite the world to come see what we’re all about.” The 1984 Games helped revitalize Los Angeles and though security and construction costs have made recent games less profitable (at least in the short term), hosting the Olympics could give an economic boost to the city. At the same time, Obama argued, hosting the Olympics would help shed the “Fortress America” image that much of the world has of the United States. The Olympics would bring people from around the world to the United States and, falling right at the end of his second term, cap off what Obama hopes would be the remaking of America’s image.
The second response gets at a more fundamental question. Not whether Chicago’s bid was a priority, but whether or not a President must constantly focus on national priorities, as opposed to having fun or taking on pet projects. I’ve addressed this question before (as well as the related question of how much the American people should have to pay for the President to do other than his job). The key take away is that at the very least, the President (and anyone else for that matter) must pursue justice (national priorities) until the point at which doing more would cause a significant risk of worsening one’s life by depriving the individual of that needed to pursue important personal goals and activities. So this “response”, it turns out, is not a very useful response, for unless the Chicago bid was a truly important personal activity for Obama (and it would be hard to argue that it meets this threshold), the President should have focused on bigger priorities.
The question of whether it was wrong for Obama to campaign for Chicago to host the Olympics, then, comes down to your view on two questions: 1) Did other countries deserve to win more than the U.S.? and 2) Did the Chicago bid constitute a national priority because of the potential economic and diplomatic benefits to the United States?
-Marc
Photo by Flickr user uncleweed used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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