I have been on vacation and will remain there for another week, but took a break from my break to write a Washington Examiner column on the attempt by the president and
his "A" team in Chicago to besmirch Mitt Romney's 1999 decision to leave Bain Capital in order to go and save the Salt Lake City Games.The tradition of very successful leaders of business departing their
comfortable and secure positions to tackle enormous problems for the sake of the
common good dates at least to the $1-a-year men of the First World War, when
Woodrow Wilson called on some very successful businessmen of that era to help
ramp up and run the enormously complicated and sudden war effort.
There have been other such generous, public-spirited acts by men and women of the private sector throughout the century that followed. Mitt Romney's decision to take on the Salt Lake Games is one of them.
My column argues that the big brains of Chicago --the same folks who brought you
the Stimulus, Obamacare, Solyndra and Fast & Furious-- have now decided it makes
great political sense to draw attention to Romney's selflessness in taking on
the Olympics.
Manhattan-Beltway media elites in turn assume that every move from Axelrod et al is a
work of genius even though the last 40 months are littered with smash-up after
smash-up as Jon Lovitz-like "Yeah, that's the ticket" plans that go awry. (See The Brief Against Obama for details.) The Obama Chicago team is quickly becoming the Wylie E. Coyote of political experts.
Now this Chicago "brain trust" has contrived to draw all of the country's
attention to the fact that Mitt Romney selflessly took a leave from the
investment firm he founded in order to move to Utah in 1999 to tackle the bankrupt,
scandal-plagued Salt Lake Games, and to do so for no money at all and at the
cost of enormous effort in hours, weeks and months worked, and that he pulled
off not just a success but an enormous success. The 2002 Games were close to cancelation when Romney arrived to take control of them. They turned out to be a wonderful display of American competence and enthusiasm, and coming just a few months after 9/11, proved a much-appreciated rallying point for the country.
Team Obama has thus arranged for this story line to appear just as the London Games in all their complexity roll out, a three week pageant that will underscore that
Romney's tenure in Utah oversaw the assembling of 2000 athletes and their families
from 70 countries to participate in 77 sports spread over 20 venues, a venture "run"
by an international committee, a national committee from every participating
country, a supervising board for every sport, as well as the federal, state and
local authorities, scrutinized by tens of thousands of media as well as an
audience of a billion people and which was primarily paid for by private sector sponsors
and ticket purchases, with all of it being conducted in the shadow of 9/11.
It looks to me like those sharpies in Chicago have done it again. By trying to
interest the public in a pseudo-scandal involving the terms of Romney's leave
-of-absence from Bain, the president and his sidekick Axelrod have given Romney center stage to talk about his Olympic success just as the world
focuses on the Olympics.
Americans admire public-spiritedness, and that is what Romney demonstrated in
1999 through 2002 when he took over the Games. The Chicago gang that always
looks to get from government cannot fathom that there are people who actually
give to government, and that voters are quite sick of the smash-and-grab-the-goodies
approach of the president's pals and are more than ready to try the
old-fashioned values of public service, even if the paperwork of selflessness
is a little complicated.
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