AND IF HE HADN'T GONE?

I should have said this days ago, but I'll say it anyway because the late hits are still coming on the president's trip to Copenhagen -- see, for instance, Richard Cohen in The Washington Post:

Barack Obama's trip to Copenhagen to pitch Chicago for the Olympics would have been a dumb move whatever the outcome.

Really? Why?

Here's what I'm not clear on: Do most Americans even realize that every other head of state with a city in the running went to Copenhagen? The king of Spain? The prime minister of Japan? The president of Brazil? Do they realize that heads of state have been personally making Olympic pitches more and more in the past few years?

In 2005 when the IOC was voting for the 2012 Olympics, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair flew into Singapore to meet dozens of IOC members and actively back London's bid.

French leader Jacques Chirac was also there, though he was holding the bare minimum of meetings, thinking frontrunner Paris had done enough with a good bid.

As has been the case on many an IOC vote, the favourite was left beaten, with London celebrating an unexpected victory largely credited to Blair's successful lobbying.

At the IOC session in Guatemala in 2007 there were two clear frontrunners for the 2014 Winter Games: Austria's Salzburg with a long winter sports tradition and South Korea's Pyeongchang, which had narrowly missed out to Vancouver four years earlier.

Rank outsider Sochi, Russia's Black Sea resort, had technically the weakest bid with almost all of the venues needed to be built from scratch and with no experience of hosting major international winter sports events.

The presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the session, addressing the IOC members in impeccable English -- a first according to his country's reporters -- proved decisive as Sochi snatched victory.

Does Richard Cohen even know any of this? Or all the other haters who think Obama shouldn't have made the trip?

I bet I know the circumstances under which we would have all known that every other head of state went to Copenhagen: we would have know that if Obama hadn't gone. Omigod! First he won't put his hand over his heart for the national anthem, now he won't stick up for America in front of the IOC! No wonder Chicago -- no, sorry: no wonder America -- lost!

Really, isn't that how the rhetoric would have gone?