‘The One’, as Oprah Winfrey called Obama, landed on his ego twice in the past two weeks with a lesson from the French, who was astounded by his ‘naivete’ and secondly today when the IOC crushed Chicago and Obama and his personal and emotional pitch on the first ballot, with a star-studded cast including the First Lady Michelle and Oprah, in  their bid for the summer Olympic Games in Chicago 2016.

Rio won.

Chicago didn’t even come in a close second despite the President’s star-studded Hollywood approach to global influence.

Senior Adviser David Axelrod on CNN blamed internal machinations of the International Olympic Committee for the rejection.  Of course if they had won they would have credited Obama as scoring one for the Gipper.  Instead he argued that the bid by Madrid was led by a former president of the IOC, who was calling in years’ worth of favors and that Rio de Janeiro, trying to become the first South American host, had a strong case as well.

“I don’t view this as a repudiation of the president or the first lady,” he said.  “I think there are politics everywhere, and there were politics inside that room.”  Of course, there are no politics in Chicago, Obama’s adopted hometown.

The trip was ill-advised at the outset, as we said in a previous column.  While there were troop surge decisions to be made in Afghanistan, the economy tanking, unemployment worsening and health care reform about to explode, Obama serves-up his bloated ego on a foolhardy pitch for the Chicago Olympic games and at the same time leaves a significant carbon foot-print on the environment.  Two of the president’s planes made the trip at a cost of $1.2 million each, more than 1.374 million pounds of carbon dioxide were expended and Chicago spent $100 M on the bid, all in dire economic times.  Nevertheless, he added 25 minutes of legitimacy to the trip by meeting with General Stanley McChrystal on board Air Force One just before take off for the trip home.

This week’s embarrassment was preceded by last weeks’ appeasement.

Last week the French and the British were urging Obama to use the most dramatic setting, which he presided over, the UN Security Council with 14 heads of state at the table, to reveal to the world that Iran had an illegal uranium enrichment facility that they had been hiding.  Obama refused.  French President Nicolas Sarkozy was forced to scrap this section of his speech.  Obama held onto the news until a day later in Pittsburg.   Apparently Sarkozy could not conceal his astonishment at Obama’s naivete’.  As Charles Krauthammer said in a column today in the Washington Post, “When France chides you for appeasement, you know you’re scraping bottom.”

While Obama apologizes to the rest of the world for everything done BO, his global image is not quite what some here in the United States believe to be equivalent to walking on water.

The Times of London said in a headline today “Obama’s Olympic Failure Will Only Add To Doubts About His Presidency.”

The lead said: “There has been a growing narrative taking hold about Barack Obama’s presidency in recent weeks: that he is loved by many, but feared by none; that he is full of lofty vision, but is actually achieving nothing with his grandiloquence.”

Amen!