Sports & Entertainment

Obama put his credibility on the line as leader of the free world by personally making a case to the International Olympic Committee for Chicago.
 
Not only did he lose — he lost bad. Chicago was rejected in the first round, a stinging, stunning rebuke of the first U.S. president in history to personally lobby to have the Olympics held in this country. The fact that it was Obama's hometown makes it particularly embarrassing. Rio won. Obama lost.

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Even though Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Olympics, I have come around, and changed my mind this week about President Barack Obama's decision to go there to make a personal pitch.
 
Days ago I joined the moaners who wondered how Obama could possibly have chosen this as a priority for his time when this very week his administration was tackling the thorny engagement of Iran, the preparation of sanctions against the Iranians, as well as an assessment for a way forward in Afghanistan. Both situations will likely dominate his presidency and test his leadership during his entire time in office. Next to dealing with Iran and Afghanistan, the decision to lobby for Chicago's shot at hosting the Olympic Games seemed petty.

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To honor the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America, Chicago held the Columbian Exposition, better known at the World’s Fair of 1893. It was a blockbuster event, planned by the noted architects Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted. Historians widely credit the Columbian Exposition as the first symbol of American exceptionalism, a sign that America was soon to become the dominant force in the world.

Since that time, Chicago has seen its fair share of ups and downs. It is still a remarkable city, filled with great people, wonderful architecture, a beautiful lakefront, great restaurants and great opera, a thriving blues scene and rich cultural tradition that rivals any city in the world.

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“USA! USA! USA!” With my family, I remember proudly cheering our American athletes at the Los Angeles Olympics.

It felt great to be an American. And it’s too bad patriotism is dead today — at least among some Republicans.

Let’s get this straight. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael “Foot-in-Mouth” Steele thinks it’s wrong of President Barack Obama to go to Copenhagen, Denmark, to try to win the 2016 Summer Games for the United States? As White House press secretary Robert Gibbs snapped, “Who’s he rooting for?” Would Steele really prefer that the Games go to Tokyo? Rio? Madrid?

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A couple of weeks ago was the week of outrageous outbursts, from an unknown South Carolina congressman’s rude interruption of the president’s speech to Congress on healthcare to tennis star Serena Williams’ crude meltdown at the U.S. Open. It also is the week when tennis star Jack Kramer died at 88. There is a connection between these seemingly disparate tennis events, and it makes an interesting story.

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“We should go over to the Senate and join in a press conference with them,” I told then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) just a few weeks after I started as his new communications director. It was an opportunity to be high-profile in a non-political issue and seemed to make all the sense in the world.

“Why?” DeLay asked.

“It will be good for your image,” I said.

“I don’t care about my image,” he said quickly. Read more...

When the wave of Woodstock nostalgia awakens this week with the 40th anniversary of that spontaneous celebration of peace, love and dope that so deeply marked a generation and impressed the media so thoroughly that we still listen to these people, youth will want to know: Is that Granny and Grandfather dancing naked in the mud? Is that Great Auntie Eleanor firing up a jumbo? To find the answers to these questions, youth might ask: Is Great Auntie a lawyer or a journalist? Then probably yes, because virtually everyone who was at Woodstock then is either a lawyer or a journalist today.

There are several unmarked or unnoticed elements of the storied Woodstock festival. First, the music sucked. Most of the performers — Country Joe, Sha-Na-Na, Quill, Mountain — were never heard from again. But Janis was there, and so was her elegant shadow, Grace Slick with the Jefferson Airplane. Nothing free and awakening like that which they had at Haight-Ashbury in California just a year or so before, but well enough for a bunch of fledgling lawyers on acid. Woodstock would be Haight-Ashbury for lawyers. Read more...

When I was growing up, Tom Watson was one of my heroes. I loved his compact swing, his calm demeanor, his regally American bearing, and his intense competitiveness. I also liked the fact that he couldn’t putt, because I can’t putt either.

To that point, I once saw the famous broadcaster Jim McKay at a Baltimore Orioles game in the early ’90s a couple weeks before the British Open and I asked him who he thought would win the tournament. He said Norman. I said, “What about my hero, Tom Watson?” He shook his head and said simply, “He can’t putt anymore.” Read more...

By returning and rest we shall be saved ...
— The Book of Common Prayer

One giant step to the moon 40 years ago today changed things. Possibly it changed everything for all the future and for everyone. Shortly thereafter, in 1977, film critic Stanley Kauffman went to the movies and saw a film that he called an epiphany, “an event in the history of faith.” It was Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” This movie could not have been appreciated before July 20, 1969, when we landed on the moon, for prior to that we were afraid of the moon. We were afraid of space. Read more...

Those of us who live in Washington can sometimes over-inflate the importance of what goes on here, foisting local stories on a national audience.

Sometimes, though, those stories can help make a useful point. So today I write about the Washington Nationals and The Washington Post and what they share in common with so many of our failing institutions.

I’ll give it away: They are now being run by people who seem to have too little regard for their companies’ unique ways of doing business. They seem to consider unimportant the sometimes-tedious ethics and practices that made the properties they’ve taken over prosper in the first place. Economy-wide, whatever the enterprise, it’s only about making as much money as possible. Corner-cutting — of all types — is the way to do it. Read more...