It was fairly early in Barack Obama’s first presidential term. Unemployment was still abnormally high, yet Obama was on the road lobbying for his adopted city of Chicago as host of the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Obama’s critics heaped on him lots of criticism. With so many out of work, what was he doing wasting his time on the Olympics? To believe the late George Melloan, longtime deputy editorial page editor at the Wall Street Journal (and full disclosure, someone I considered a friend), Obama did right.
Indeed, we rarely suffer a lack of political action. Oh, but when they act. As Melloan put it in his very excellent 2016 memoir of the Great Depression, When the New Deal Came to Town, “When Washington makes mistakes, even with good intentions, they often are doozies.” So very true.
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