Patriotism

I must possess an odd brand of patriotism. I never thought I did when I was growing up, but now, in the early years of the 21st century, it has become increasingly clear to me.

Maybe my mind processes things in ways that others do not.

A few years ago, I heard arguments from Republicans that suggested I wasn't supporting the troops if I wasn't supporting the war in Iraq — and, therefore, I wasn't patriotic.

George W. Bush and the Republicans set themselves up for criticism when they smugly and self–assuredly told Americans that there were stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they were aimed at America. It was easy to frighten Americans in those days. The September 11 attacks were still a fresh memory.

But it never was that simple for me.

My counter–argument was that I was supporting the troops, that it was possible to support the troops and oppose the policy they were required to carry out.

It is the same — in my mind — as a law that is passed by the state legislature. I may not agree with that law. In fact, there may be some in law enforcement who do not agree with the law. But it is their job to enforce the law.

Policy makers and policy enforcers are rarely, if ever, the same people.

For a long time, that attitude seemed rare, almost nonexistent, but in the last couple of years, I have seen more and more people who feel that way.

Barack Obama's trip to Copenhagen last week to lobby — unsuccessfully — for the 2016 Olympics to come to Chicago has produced the flip side to the patriotism argument.

"Whenever President Obama has traveled overseas and offered pointed and direct assessments of the United States, some of them critical, Republicans have ripped him for criticizing America, saying a president should always defend the United States," writes Roland Martin for CNN.com.

"So I want to hear the explanation by these so–called patriots of their giddy behavior over the United States losing the 2016 Olympic Games."

It is a valid complaint, and it is one to which I tend to feel vulnerable — to a degree.

But the facts are more complicated.

For starters, I am not a Republican, but one does not have to be a Republican to disagree with a Democratic president. I know independents and Democrats who did not think Obama should make the trip to Copenhagen, and I am one of them.

Yes, I have criticized Obama when I felt he made mistakes. But I have never joined in the chorus that has accused him of being anti–America. And I don't believe anyone who wants to bring the Olympics to America can be anti–America.

I've never really understood the anti–America argument. I am not so cynical that I believe someone who hates this country could run for its highest office, fool a majority of its adults and be elected to lead it when his real objective was to destroy it.

Americans on both sides of the political spectrum can be quite superficial, but most aren't that gullible that they would willingly hand over power to a smooth–talking shyster or truly believe others had done so. Are they?

Having said that, yes, I was critical of the decision to go to Copenhagen. But I didn't mind if Chicago was awarded the Olympics for 2016, and I was not glad Chicago lost its bid to host the Olympics. I simply felt Obama had more important things to do right here.

The decision to go to Copenhagen has set off a firestorm of sorts. In Commentary, Jennifer Rubin wrote that Obama received a lesson in the "limits of egomania." Clarence Page observed, in the Chicago Tribune, that Obama's "magic" has its restrictions. For others, like Edward Luce of Financial Times, the fruitless trip breathed new life into questions about Chicago cronyism.

Clearly, there are many ways to look at this. And I am inclined to think Martin is right when he urges those who have celebrated the loss as Obama's loss to "turn in your flag lapel pins and stop boasting of being so patriotic." It was a loss for America.

But Obama set himself up for all this — in the exasperatingly casual way that he so often does. And that may be the thing about him that many Americans find refreshing. He doesn't do things in the typically presidential way.

But not everyone finds that reassuring. In fact, some were alarmed that Obama wasn't content to delegate the authority for that task to his wife and remain in Washington while the unemployment rate went up and his health care plan became watered down faster than the Titanic.

Obama became president during the greatest economic crisis this country has faced in three–quarters of a century. A president can't choose the conditions that exist when he takes office, but he can choose how he will respond to them.

Filling out his NCAA brackets or making the rounds of the late night talk shows or presiding over a couple of beers and a "teachable moment" or traveling to Copenhagen may seem worthwhile, but they lack the urgency of rising unemployment. At some point, a president must decide what his priority will be.

After that, worthwhile (but lesser) goals must be turned over to others.

I believed last week — and I believe today — that Obama needed to make joblessness his priority.

Presidential Priorities

Everyone has an agenda, even if everyone doesn't acknowledge it.

Everyone thinks his/her issue should be the priority.

And, when Barack Obama took office in January, there were a lot of things that needed to be addressed. I understand the pressure he was under.

So I tried to be patient — even though I have been unemployed since last year and I have grown increasingly alarmed each month as job losses have mounted.

I heard all the big talk in February when the stimulus package was passed. I thought job creation was the priority, especially when I heard Sen. Ben Nelson say, "Call us the jobs squad."

Of course, I thought job creation was a priority a few months earlier, when candidate Obama promised tax credits for businesses that hired Americans in 2009 and 2010. Turned out that was just another politician's pledge to win votes.

It was hard for me to stay silent when Obama famously filled out his NCAA tournament bracket in March, but I tried to be patient when Obama went on TV later in the month and compared his bowling skills to the Special Olympics. His remark opened up a discussion about the use of the word "retard," but it didn't alleviate the unemployment problem.

As the spring went on and administration critics held their famous "tea parties", I continued to try to be patient — as I did when an opening popped up in the Supreme Court. As president, Obama had to nominate a replacement.

By then, the battle lines seemed to have been drawn.

We got into the summer months, and, in July, the president urged the unemployed to be patient so I tried to be patient, but I knew then, as I know now, that time is not an infinite commodity for me. I was assured, by many sources, that job creation was not on the back burner. I wasn't convinced of that, but I put my trust in them.

Anyway, during the summer, the administration turned most of its attention to health care reform. And I tried to remain patient — but then Democrats helped to derail the public option that Obama wanted. Meaningful reform no longer seems like a possibility, even a remote one.

This week may have exhausted what was left of my patience.

While Obama was jetting to Copenhagen to press for Chicago to be the host of the 2016 Olympics, word came out that unemployment had gone up in September, that more than 250,000 jobs had been lost.

Phil Izzo of the Wall Street Journal reported on economists' assessment of the weak labor picture. National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers insisted that the worst of the recession is over. That's a hard sell for the unemployed, especially since one–third of jobless Americans have been out of work for more than six months.

Meanwhile, Obama seems to have been under the impression that his charisma would carry the day with the International Olympic Committee. It did not.

The Wall Street Journal, which hasn't exactly been Obama's ally, insisted that it would not "join those who pounded President Obama for taking a day to travel to Copenhagen."

But Mike Lupica, in the New York Daily News, came closer to expressing my feelings when he wrote that "[t]his wasn't the President's fight. For a smart guy, he does some dumb things sometimes."

Or, as the New York Times asked, "What was President Obama thinking?"

Definitely Not a Slow News Day

Today has been the kind of day that makes me wish I was back on a newspaper copy desk.

Several interesting things have been happening today. I spent many of my copy desk years in sports, so Friday nights always tended to be busy for us, whatever the season. By comparison, most of the time, Friday nights seemed to be rather tame on the news side.

I found out that wasn't always true when I was transferred to the news side.

It is a fact that there are "slow news days." But today wasn't one of them.

• I guess the most important news of the day was something that news editors already knew was coming — the monthly jobs report. Unemployment continued to make its way to double digits, going up to 9.8%. For those who thought the recession was over, as Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times, "mission not accomplished."
  
  Michael McKee and Alex Tanzi report in Bloomberg.com that "[f]or the first time, the average amount of time it takes fired employees to find a new job exceeds the length of their standard unemployment benefits."
  
  And the loss of more than 250,000 jobs in September apparently contributed to another week of losses on Wall Street.


• The jobs report comes out on the first Friday of each month so editors have a lot of time to prepare for it, just not a lot of time to digest the numbers.
  
  We don't know all of the revenue Chicago lost when it was rejected by the International Olympic Committee. But one of those who lobbied for the city in Copenhagen said it lost $70 million in fundraising for expenses.
  
  How much was lost from the additional tourism that would have been generated? I suppose that is anyone's guess.
  
  Losing isn't just measured in dollars. Given the fact that Barack Obama flew to Copenhagen to boost Chicago, Republicans on Capitol Hill already were speculating that "the White House staff, the senior staff needs to get together somewhere and figure out how they are going to fix this, because they are in a deep slump."
  
  Back in Chicago, Rick Pearson, Katherine Skiba and Kathy Bergen of the conservative Chicago Tribune said it was a "a political blow for President Barack Obama and Mayor Richard Daley."


• Obama certainly didn't need any more bad news, but the director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy said it wasn't likely that a climate and energy bill will be ready for his signature before he goes to Copenhagen to negotiate a global climate treaty in December.


• In what could be called, I suppose, he said–he said, David Letterman revealed last night that he had been the target of an extortion attempt. Letterman said someone told him to pay $2 million or information about his sexual relationships with women who worked on his show would be made public.
  
  Letterman said he had contacted the D.A., and a CBS employee was arrested Thursday. Today, Letterman was commended by critics for the way he handled things, and the employee entered a plea of not guilty to the charge of attempted grand larceny.
  
  I guess this story will have legs.

And so it goes.

Sportscaster Jim McKay Dies

Do you remember the Summer Olympics of 1972?

Do you remember the tragedy of the Munich Games, when the Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes?

If you do, you will remember hearing the news from Jim McKay, who somberly reported the murders of all 11 athletes.

"When I was a kid my father used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They have now said there were 11 hostages; two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, nine were killed at the airport tonight."

Then McKay looked into the camera, with the saddest pair of eyes I've ever seen.

"They're all gone," he quietly told his stunned audience.

For many people, that phrase is as memorable as Al Michaels' "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" when the U.S. hockey team completed its improbable victory over the Soviets at Lake Placid in 1980.

Although he spent most of his career in sports, McKay's work in Munich required him to cross over into the hardest of hard news reporting.

His professionalism was rewarded when legendary news anchorman Walter Cronkite sent him a telegram that said, "Dear Jim, today you honored yourself, your network and your industry."

McKay died today, apparently of natural causes, at the age of 86.

The irony of McKay's passing, as Sports Illustrated reports today, is that he died only hours before Big Brown is scheduled to try to complete thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown by winning the Belmont Stakes.

It is ironic because McKay, longtime host of ABC's Wide World of Sports, considered horse racing his favorie sport.

It would be fitting if horse racing's 30-year drought in the Triple Crown came to an end this afternoon.

It might happen. Joe Drape of the New York Times says Big Brown is a "mortal lock" to win today's race against an "unaccomplished field."

If Big Brown wins the Triple Crown, I will have only one regret.

I wish McKay could be here to see it happen.