Hugh Hewitt: Begala to Obama: Listen to me, dummy
By: Hugh Hewitt
Examiner Columnist
October 5, 2009
Chicago and the Olympics weren’t a great mix from the start. Sort of like holding an international gathering of Alcoholics Anonymous in the Guinness St. James’ Gate Brewery in Dublin, Ireland.
The grifters and graft merchants of the Windy City couldn’t have helped themselves, and the results wouldn’t have been pretty. As a lover of the Olympics, I am disappointed, but perhaps we can nominate a less problematic locale for 2020 than Chicago and New York have proved to be in the last two rounds.
The aftermath of the president’s pratfall has been interesting to watch. The first-round knockout was so embarrassing that even the Beltway’s cadre of professional friends of the powerful were eager to telegraph that they were out of the loop and without influence on this one.
Paul Begala, who is beginning to make Brutus look like a paragon of loyalty, rushed to Politico’s Josh Gerstein to reaffirm to the world that he had warned the president not to go.
When the media’s merchants of inside scoop are looking for opportunities to broadcast how little their advice matters, you know the smash-up was pretty bad.
The obvious question: If the president cannot persuade the International Olympic Committee, which is, after all, merely corrupt, to go his way, how will he persuade Iran’s mullahs, who are both corrupt and fanatical, to give up their nukes?
Answer: He won’t, but the legacy media will be able to cover for his failure in that far more significant arena.
The stunned disbelief on the faces of a half-dozen Beltway-Manhattan media elites when the live announcement of the big boot to Chicago’s backside was made could not have been more revealing.
How could this be happening to their most favorite, best prepared and least unilateral president ever? It didn’t take long for the senator from Blagojevich, Roland Burris, to blame George Bush for the catastrophe that befell Chicago’s speculator class, and by Monday morning the momentarily stunned David Axelrod will have worked that line into his explanation.
The usually never-at-a-loss-for-spin Axelrod had sounded bitter on CNN when he rushed out to blame politics for the disaster, an unexpected if refreshing break from the Bush-centric rhetoric of the Obama inner circle.
If this is how the president prepares for big meetings and how his staff reacts to unexpected results abroad, we’d better hope he stays home and they get some new tutors. Maybe Begala? He’s got lots of advice for the rookies from the Midwest.
The legacy media will now fill up with explanations of how this isn’t so bad. “As someone who publicly counseled against the president making this trip, I still admire the guts he showed in taking it,” the quotable Begala said as he set up his final word on the fiasco. “This is a stumble, not a fall.”
My wild guess is that the first lady is not so nonchalant about being dragged into her first big failure as an international figure. Mrs. Obama has had a nearly flawless run since last November’s triumph, and her team put her in a situation where not only did she not win, she sounded bad in heading off to defeat.
This is a one-week story and a lifetime anecdote, the sort of pundit cliche that will surface again and again as in, “This reminds me of when President Obama rushed off to Copenhagen even as his plate filled with tough decisions on the war and his health care agenda was bogging down.”
Or, “In retrospect, the gaps in the skill sets of Obama’s first team were revealed when a poorly prepared and overconfident Obama jetted off to Europe to knock off what he thought would be an easy win and came back looking like the loser Chicago was.”
And every time he hears reference made to Friday’s events, Obama will have to run through the list of the people who set him up and let him down. The only thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t Paul Begala, who is much too smart to have fallen into such an obvious trap.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
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