Olympic Spirit: Obama Gambles on Hometown

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: There is no silver medal. President Obama will probably be in the air when he finds out whether he got what he came for in Denmark — whether he could score for his hometown the kind of international event that’s only come to it of late when he’s done something like win a presidential election. In the scope of the week or the month, nothing — not the Afghanistan meetings, the public option setbacks, the nuclear talks with Iran, the fresh jobs numbers coming later Friday morning — will have the staying power of a win for Chicago. (And the president makes the most of his trip by getting Gen. Stanley McChrystal to hop over to Copenhagen — where he met with the president on the ground on Air Force One for 25 minutes Friday morning.) If the president gets bad news during his flight home — well, it’s back to his regularly scheduled juggle. From the president’s speech to the International Olympic Committee Friday morning — personalizing the pitch: “It’s not just the American dream that is the Olympic spirit; it’s the essence of the Olympic spirit, and that’s why we see so much of ourselves in these Games,” he said. “That’s why we want them in Chicago, that’s why we want them in America.” From First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech: “I never dreamed that the Olympic flame might one day light up lives in my neighborhood,” she said early Friday morning. “But today, I can dream, and I am dreaming of an Olympic and Paralympic Games in Chicago that will light up lives in neighborhoods all across America and all across the world; that will expose all our neighborhoods to new sports and new role models; that will show every child that regardless of wealth, or gender, or race, or physical ability, there is a sport and a place for them, too. This, in a sense, is the real test of the international “celebrity” — whether a personal appeal can tip some pretty hefty scales, with a pretty difficult audience to impress. This looks a lot savvier if the president gets what he came for. ABC’s Yunji de Nies, from Copenhagen, on “Good Morning America” Friday: “The presentation was everything they promised — emotional, heartfelt, energetic. But will it be enough?”
The process really is like an Iowa caucus, just with every voter as self-entitled as that woman from Cedar Rapids who won’t support anyone who hasn’t signed her hat:

“If no city gains a majority in the first round, IOC President Jacques Rogge will announce which city has received the least number of votes and has been eliminated,” Matthew Futterman reports in The Wall Street Journal. “The process repeats itself until a winner emerges, with Mr. Rogge scheduled to announce the winning city at 6:30 p.m. in Copenhagen, or 11:30 a.m. in Chicago. The White House has yet to say whether Mr. Obama will stick around for the vote.”

The critics are far more likely to break through if the president doesn’t win: “The president’s whirlwind trip put him in the Danish capital for less than five hours Friday,” per the AP. “But the compressed time frame did not shield Obama from Republican criticism that he shouldn’t be hopscotching to Europe in Air Force One when there were so many pressing issues to deal with at home.”

As for those critics: “I think they should take some pride in the US’s win, and you know we’ll make sure they get some good seats once Chicago does host the games,” White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel tells ABC’s Jake Tapper.

Wait — do you smell an ACORN reference? “Obama is Chicago, Chicago is Obama,” talk-show host Laura Ingraham said Thursday, per McClatchy’s Steven Thomma. She went on to ridicule the White House statement that Obama found video of the student murder chilling, saying, “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of similar beatings” had occurred in Chicago “since Obama was cutting his teeth at ACORN.”

You want it? You own it: “Chicago to the brink of landing the 2016 Olympic Games, but after Obama makes the city’s case before the International Olympic Committee Friday morning in Copenhagen, the president’s own legacy will become inextricably intertwined with the fate of Chicago’s bid,” Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel reports. “History has shown that’s not always a good thing.”

The president could have stayed up late to catch some action back home (and no, that’s not a Letterman reference): a Senate Finance Committee health care bill, minus Congressional Budget Office scoring — and therefore, one last vote.

“A final vote was delayed until next week so budget officials can certify the legislation does not add to federal deficits. Given the Democrats’ 13-10 majority only the final margin is in doubt,” the AP’s David Espo reports. “Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said she has not yet decided how to vote. ‘I’ve got a lot to think about,’ she said.”

The president’s statement on the Finance Committee work: “As a result of this work, we are now closer than ever before to finally passing reform that will offer security to those who have coverage and affordable insurance to those who don’t. We have a long way to go, but I am confident that as we move forward, we will continue to engage with each other as productively as the members of the Finance Committee, and will get reform passed this year.”

As a closing wrinkle, this is as definitive as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is likely to be (not that we really know what he means):

“We are going to have a public option before this bill goes to the president’s desk,” Reid, D-Nev., said in a conference call with constituents, per the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Benjamin Spillman. “I believe the public option is so vitally important to create a level playing field and prevent the insurance companies from taking advantage of us.”

Tracking the migration: “Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is shifting to the center on a government-run public health insurance plan, warming to a version that is being supported by some Blue Dog Democrats,” The Hill’s Mike Soraghan and Jared Allen report. “Pelosi’s recent public statements and private conversations indicate her willingness to move away from the more liberal proposal, which she had been promoting as being more cost-effective. The centrist view was negotiated with Blue Dogs to move the bill out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”

Don’t think the hard work is done: “The coming days will feature intense closed-door wrangling among Senate Democrats as they struggle to work out key differences between the two versions of the bill, reflecting divisions within their own party over such issues as whether there should be a government-backed insurance option, which industries should be taxed to pay for nearly $500 billion in insurance subsidies to expand coverage, and what responsibilities individuals and employers should have,” The Boston Globe’s Lisa Wangsness reports.

Not sure how new this is — but it’s easy enough to understand: “In recent days, Republican leaders hoping to derail Mr. Obama’s health care effort have seized on a new line of attack: that the proposed overhaul is a vehicle for a barrage of hidden and not-so-hidden tax increases, and a violation of Mr. Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year,” Adam Nagourney and David M. Herszenhorn report in The New York Times. “The new message seeks to move the health care debate to ground that Republicans know well and have long exploited to their advantage.”

And will the president fight? Dana Milbank keys off a Helen Thomas-Robert Gibbs exchange to ask: “Why isn’t the president more decisive and forceful? On many of the most pressing issues — the public option in health reform, troop levels in Afghanistan, sanctions against Iran — the administration has hewed to hemming and hawing.”

“Gibbs had been scheduled to give his daily briefing at 1 p.m., then pushed it back to 1:15. At 1:27, the public-address system gave a ‘two-minute warning’ for the briefing. Gibbs walked in 10 minutes later. The extra prep time was probably unnecessary, because the answers ranged from namby to pamby,” Milbank writes.

Friday is a jobs day — and Vice President Joe Biden offered the pre-buttal on Thursday without adding those famous words “or save”: “We’ve created what we said we would create, actually a little more than we were — we said we’d be able to create in the first 200 days, we think over a million jobs. Even independent validators say it’s somewhere between 750 [thousand] and a million.” (We look forward to such validation.)

What about another stimulus? “I sense a growing willingness among movers and shakers to declare ‘Mission Accomplished’ when it comes to fighting the slump. It’s time, I keep hearing, to shift our focus from economic stimulus to the budget deficit,” Paul Krugman writes in his New York Times column. “Look, I know more stimulus is a hard sell politically. But it’s urgently needed. The question shouldn’t be whether we can afford to do more to promote recovery. It should be whether we can afford not to. And the answer is no.”

On Afghanistan — moving in this direction? (Or just leaking from this direction?)

“Senior White House officials have begun to make the case for a policy shift in Afghanistan that would send few, if any, new combat troops to the country and instead focus on faster military training of Afghan forces, continued assassinations of al-Qaeda leaders and support for the government of neighboring Pakistan in its fight against the Taliban,” Scott Wilson and Anne E. Kornblut report in The Washington Post. “The deliberations over McChrystal’s assessment are expected to last several weeks, and officials who participated in Wednesday’s meeting say it is too early to discern what direction Obama intends to take.”

Making the opposite case, very publicly: “The top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, used a speech here on Thursday to reject calls for the war effort to be scaled down from defeating the Taliban insurgency to a narrower focus on hunting down Al Qaeda, an option suggested by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as part of the current White House strategy review,” John F. Burns writes for The New York Times.

Said McChrystal: “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.”

A bit odd to have a general living a speech to a London think-tank, but not testifying before Congress? (A bit odd, as well, to have this debate over war strategies and methods play out its internal divisions in newspapers and on TV screens?)

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who lost a vote to force Gen. Stanley McChrystal to testify: “So it’s ok with the administration for General McChrystal to go on ’60 Minutes,’ it’s ok for him to give a speech at the Institute for Strategic Studies in London, but the administration does not want General McChrystal and General Petraeus before the Senate Armed Services Committee. How does that work?” McCain said, ABC’s Jonathan Karl reports.

Shift at the National Security Council: “When Barack Obama came to the Senate, Mark Lippert — a veteran Senate aide and newly minted Naval Reserve officer — was the first foreign policy adviser he hired,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos reports. “Now, Lippert — currently serving as Deputy National Security Adviser and Chief of Staff to the NSC — is becoming the first senior member of the President’s foreign policy team to leave the Administration.”

Patience, anyone? “Barack Obama’s decision on troop strength and the way forward in Afghanistan is likely weeks away after the president convened his top national-security and military advisers for another round of strategy sessions,” Bloomberg’s Hans Nichols and James Rowley report. On Iran — a two-week deadline:

ABC’s Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller: “President Obama appeared in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House Thursday afternoon to demand that leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran take concrete actions to defuse international tensions regarding its nuclear program, beginning with allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency ‘full access’ to Iran’s nuclear facility at Qom within the next two weeks.”

A budge: “Iran has agreed ‘in principle’ to send out most of its stockpile of potential bomb fuel to Russia for further refining — a significant step that decreases the chances it could make a nuclear weapon in the near future,” the Washington Times’ Nicholas Kralev reports.

Debate night in New Jersey: “The rivals in the New Jersey governor’s race met Thursday night in a rambunctious first of three debates, with the Republican Christopher J. Christie assailing Gov. Jon S. Corzine over what he called ‘suffocating’ taxes and job losses, and the Democratic incumbent dismissing Mr. Christie’s fiscal ideas as ‘fantasy’ and his criticisms as dishonest,” David M. Halbfinger reports in The New York Times. “But it was the little-known independent, Christopher Daggett, a former Environmental Protection Agency official, who all but stole the show, promoting a plan to cut the state’s skyrocketing property taxes by up to 25 percent and haranguing Mr. Christie in particular for lacking a specific plan of his own.”

Lead quotes in the Newark Star-Ledger: “Mr. Christie has no plan. It’s a fantasy,” Corzine said. “Making tough decisions in a tough environment is what being a governor is about.”

“We are going to reduce spending,” Christie said. “There’s a lot to be done and we will do it.”

Getting worse (again) for Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.: The New York Times reports that Ensign made multiple calls to try to land a job for Doug Hampton.

“The job pitch left out one salient fact: the senator was having an affair with Mr. Hampton’s wife, Cynthia, a campaign aide,” Eric Lichtblau and Eric Lipton report. “In the coming months, the senator arranged for Mr. Hampton to join a political consulting firm and lined up several donors as his lobbying clients, according to interviews, e-mail messages and other records. Mr. Ensign and his staff then repeatedly intervened on the companies’ behalf with federal agencies, often after urging from Mr. Hampton.”

“While the affair made national news in June, the role that Mr. Ensign played in assisting Mr. Hampton and helping his clients has not been previously disclosed. Several experts say those activities may have violated an ethics law that bars senior aides from lobbying the Senate for a year after leaving their posts.”

(Intriguing nugget: “At a black-tie Christmas party at the White House in 2006, Mr. Ensign and Ms. Hampton beamed as they posed for a picture with President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura. It was that night that he realized that his feelings toward Ms. Hampton had become romantic, Mr. Ensign later admitted to Mr. Hampton, according to Mr. Hampton.”)

Of 2012 rumblings — Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., headlines the Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s “Defending the American Dream Summit” in Arlington, Va., Friday night.

Plus, writes Roll Call’s Jackie Kucinich: “The official purpose of House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence’s (Ind.) trip to South Carolina this month is to attend fundraisers on behalf of his House colleagues. But the trip is fueling speculation that the Indiana Republican is charting a course for higher office.” Coming up on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” Sunday: UN Ambassador Susan Rice; plus Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, live in studio. The roundtable: George Will, Cokie Roberts, Matt Dowd, and Katrina vanden Heuvel.

The Kicker:

“There’s a public option, then there’s a public option, then there’s a public option. We’re going to look at each of them.” — Sen. Harry Reid, considering his options.

“Oscar de la Hoya.” — David Axelrod, asked by ABC’s Charlie Gibson at The Atlantic forum at the Newseum whether President Obama and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel are like “Felix and Oscar in the White House.”

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