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Burris blames Bush for Olympic flameout
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Senator Roland Burris (aka the Placeholder) is not the most popular man in Washington. Having been appointed to President Obama’s old seat by disgraced former Governor Rod Blagojevich, Burris keeps a low profile these days. Mainstream media outlets all but ignore him, even back home in Chicago.
But a rather obscure Hollywood focused website reported on Friday that Burris has firm ideas about who lost the Olympics for Chicago: George W. Bush.
Burris stated in an interview, shortly after the announcement, that the image of the U. S. has been so tarnished in the last 8 years that, even Barack Obama making an unprecedented pitch for the games could not overcome the hatred the world has for us as a result of George Bush.
Political aftershocks: Biggest losers are Daley and Jarrett
On a more serious note, now that the initial shock of Chicago’s drubbing has worn off, more rational observers are questioning who has been damaged by the public humiliation and where Chicago goes from here.
Estimates of the damage done to President Obama by the IOC’s decision—after an unprecedented personal appearance by a US head of state—range from a glancing blow to a major, if largely hidden, wound. There were plenty of voices on the left as well as the right of the political spectrum that suggested he would gain little and risk a good deal by appearing in Copenhagen. But no one seems to have predicted that Chicago would be blown out in the first round with a mere 18 votes—regardless of whether President Obama made the trip or not. And it is the scope of the loss, with its implications of dreadful political miscalculation and lack of judgment on someone’s part, that is the real story here.
So you have an inevitable round of finger pointing well under way in Chicago and Washington, and where it ends is anyone’s guess. Mr. and Mrs. Obama can justifiably claim that they were just the spokespeople, called in by hometown friends to give the final presentation some needed pizzazz. And everyone in America knows who called in this particular high-level favor: Mayor Richard Daley and senior White House advisor Valerie Jarrett.
Now, no one is more closely associated with the Chicago bid than Daley. No one needed this win more than Daley. Daley’s political future, already on the ropes, is cloudier than ever before. But as the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass points out today, at 68 years of age and being within sight of passing his father’s record as longest serving mayor of a major US city, Daley has nothing to prove and little to lose.
Valerie Jarrett, on the other hand, is looking very politically vulnerable. Even before the Olympics debacle, she was on a collision course with other powerful Washington Democrats wary of her closeness to the president and the open-endedness of her political mandate. Here is the New York Times Magazine’s Robert Draper in an exhaustive expose of Jarrett published in July:
Valerie Jarrett is a Washington outsider with a Washingtonian’s mind-deadening job title: senior adviser and assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement. Roughly translated, she is Obama’s intermediary to the outside world. But Jarrett is also the president’s closest friend in the White House, and it is not lost on her colleagues that when senior staff meetings in the Oval Office break up, she often stays behind with the boss. Her influence leaves few fingerprints.
But her fingerprints are all over President Obama’s trip to Copenhagen, and she is scrambling to deflect attention away from herself and redirect it onto others. Today’sChicago Tribune quotes her as saying that:
"The intelligence that we had from the U.S. Olympic Committee and Chicago bid team was that it was very close and therefore well worth our efforts. The message was that . . . a personal appeal from the president would make a huge difference."
In other words, don’t look at me. They told me it’d be fine.
But Jarrett had been far too involved in the details of the bid—and through her had involved the White House at the highest possible level—to be able to back away from the mess now. Jarrett, notes the Tribune, had earlier this year assured the IOC that “the White House was prepared to lend enormous logistical support to the Games.” She was the liaison with Chicago 2016 and ran their Washington end of the operation out of her office inside the White House. How can she possibly hope to distance herself from that effort now?
In a prescient look at Jarrett’s role in the Olympics effort posted just prior to the vote, British political blogger Ian Leslie wrote:
Jarrett will have been the one who persuaded Obama that it was worth betting some presidential capital on this and making the trip. And I suspect that she she did so against the advice of Rahm and Ax, who are probably thinking that with Afghanistan, healthcare, and the economy all at high levels of intensity, this is a gamble the president can do without.
It is unlikely that the Obamas will eject a close and trusted friend from their inner circle over a relatively minor (as these things go) political embarrassment. But it is an open question whether Jarrett can withstand a steady string of scandals, of which her handling of the Olympics is only the most recent. Just two months ago she was wounded by her association with “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones, who had to resign when it was revealed that he had signed more than one petition accusing George W. Bush’s White House of complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And conservative commentators Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin have focused tremendous attention on her alleged ties to ACORN, the SEIU, and business interests (including her own) that stood to gain financially if the Olympics had come to Chicago.
The fallout from last Friday’s drama in Copenhagen may be just beginning.
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