No Gold, No Glory for Obama

Despite flying to Copenhagen to make a pitch for a U.S. 2016 Olympics in Chicago, President Obama came up short.

Image: OLIVIER MORIN/AFP/Getty Images

No, you can’t.

That was the message the International Olympic Committee gave President Obama Friday,

when it rejected his pleas to award Chicago the 2016 Olympics. The Windy City was knocked out on the first ballot of voting.

The president had flown to Copenhagen to make an in-person pitch for the Games. It didn’t have the desired effect. Chicago was supposed to be one of the front-runners for the Olympics, along with Rio de Janeiro. But Madrid survived to challenge Rio, while Chicago and Tokyo fell to the wayside.

The president was faced with even more disappointing news as he flew home to the United States. The Department of Labor reported the U.S. lost 263,000 jobs in September, much more than expected, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, inching ever-so-closer to the double-digit range that makes talk of a recovering economy ring hollow.

Republicans were quick to use the job loss numbers as political ammunition. Looking back, they contended the rising unemployment rate shows that the $787 billion economic stimulus plan enacted in February was a waste of money. Looking forward, they argued the president’s health care reform plan would make employers even less likely to hire more workers.

“The president himself has said that job creation is the ultimate measure of economic performance,” House Minority Leader John Boehner, Ohio Republican, said. “With our economy still losing jobs, we are headed for what appears to be, at best, a jobless recovery. That is not what the American people were promised.”

His Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said the jobs loss numbers were relevant to the debate over health care reform. Among other things, the bill would require employers to provide insurance to their workers or pick up part of the tab for the cost of insuring them through the government. Many Republicans, including Obama’s new best friend, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, also aren’t convinced the bill would lower insurance premiums for employers, the main goal businesses wanted from reform.

If you were an employer, McConnell asked, would you be incentivized by this bill to hire more people? “I think the answer is you’re not,” he said.

Obama has an opportunity over the next few weeks to rebound from his Olympics loss and win a more important fight, if he can find the votes to push health care reform through both the House and the Senate.

But job losses will continue to dog him, most likely. Small businesses are continuing to shed jobs, said Bill Dunkelberg, the chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business. Obama administration officials contend the job loss numbers would be much worse if it weren’t for the economic stimulus bill. They point out that the U.S. economy was losing 700,000 jobs a month when they took office.

Even so, Vice President Joe Biden said Friday, “We don’t think that ‘less bad’ is good. ‘Less bad’ is not our measure of success. One job lost is one job too many.”

The economic recovery the administration is working to create won’t be achieved, he said, “until we’re standing here and announcing substantial positive numbers, a positive growth rate in jobs.”

That day better come by the time the 2012 Olympics in London is held, or Biden and the president will lose their jobs.