OLYMPIC-SIZED FAILURE: While American Soldiers Die and Unemployment Climbs, Obama Ogled Olympics for Big Union Backers

As America's Campaigner-in-Chief returned home empty handed from Copenhagen, where his herculean effort to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago ended in global humiliation and failure, his critics and pundits have, thus far, missed a few big recipients who would have benefited from the extravagant campaign (at taxpayer expense) to snag the games for Chi-Town.

As the Republican National Committee blasted Obama's overnight excursion as playing "booster" to "Obama's Chicago Fat Cat Friends" on the day it was announced unemployment hit 9.8% nationwide, they failed to mention the biggest recipients to bringing the Olympics "home" to Chicago would have been Obama's union buddies.

It has long been estimated that the cost of bringing the Olympics to Chicago would be $4.8 billion or more. Since Chicago is a big union town, second only to New York, much of the money that would have been spent would have gone the city's unionized workers and, of course, their union bosses--from the construction trade unions to the hotels workers' union, UNITE -HERE.

By way of comparison, were the Olympics to have been awarded to Chicago, one need only look to Atlanta, as Time notes:

If there is one Olympic city for Chicago to emulate, it would be Atlanta. The city's $1.7 billion privately funded Summer Games in 1996 sparked a construction boom in the city's downtown core and, according to the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, generated $5 billion in economic activity, including $1.8 billion in hotel, residential and commercial construction.

Since Chicago would have spent nearly three times the amount Atlanta spent (assuming no union cost over runs occurred), it is likely they assumed the amount of money made would be three times its investment, or about $15 billion, which translates into the hundreds of millions in union dues.

Unfortunately for the union bosses, Obama and his teleprompter's star power was not well enough received to even come in a close second, as Chicago was eliminated in the first round of IOC voting. As the Times (UK) comments, Obama's failure adds to growing doubts about his presidency stating that "he is full of lofty vision, but is actually achieving nothing with his grandiloquence."

Writer Amanda Keller is even more direct in her assessment of Obama's folly to Denmark:

Hypocritical acts attached to this venture are endless. The mere appearance of the Commander in Chief jet-setting to Copenhagen simultaneously to soldiers coming home in body bags from Afghanistan (the appropriate war) while his general, McCrystal, waits and waits and waits on an answer to a request over a month old is nothing short of criminal neglect. This ineptitude piled on to the arrogance of his wife, a woman who has benefited all her adult life from the sacrifice of other Americans for her ivy-league education, the education she used to flunk the Bar the first time, only to eventually pass and practice law for all of a nanosecond opting instead to ride her husband’s political coat tails along the corrupt avenues of Chicago. Fancy. [Read the rest of Ms. Keller's piece here.]

So, as Americans die overseas and more and more lose their jobs back home, we taxpayers will be stuck with the multi-million dollar tab of a president and his entourage campaigning to pay back his supporters.

[Note: We suspect it will be only a matter of hours before the Liberal Left makes the claim that the IOC's rejection of Chicago is due to racism.]

Follow Dienekes' Place on Twitter.