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I did CNN.com with Politics Daily’s Matt Lewis and The Muslim Guy, Arsalan Iftikhar on Barack Obama’s trip to Copenhagen:

Embedded video from <a href=”http://www.cnn.com/video” mce_href=”http://www.cnn.com/video”>CNN Video</a>

Obviously, Barack Obama had a bad day in Copenhagen today with the failure of Chicago’s bid for the Olympics. Of course, many Chicagoans were mixed. (I was negative for a variety of reasons including the inability of the South Side, where I lived for 8 years, to handle the infrastructural requirements)

But it is worth pointing out that this story will not go away. In two months, Obama will be heading back to Copenhagen for another failure, the UN Climate Conference. He will be going to Copenhagen empty handed, with no climate change bill to show. Indeed, the top story right now at the official site notes that “the honeymoon appears to be over” and compares Obama to former President George W. Bush. Indeed The Economist echoes this language, in a story dated yesterday entitled “The honeymoon between Europe and Barack Obama’s America is over.”

European Union politicians and officials are dismayed that, with a poisonous debate over health reform chewing up his political capital in Congress, Mr Obama may not secure legislation fixing binding emissions targets for America before the climate-change summit in Copenhagen in December. They also think the health-care impasse explains the lack of progress on the Doha world-trade talks. Nor did Europeans enjoy the G20 meeting that Mr Obama hosted in Pittsburgh. Despite hogging a ludicrous number of seats at the table, the EU came away with only one big Europe-specific agreement: alas, for them, it was a plan to cut their voting power at the IMF.

Today, we saw that Obama’s international celebrity is not matched by his international clout. And this message is going to get nailed home with issue after issue, whether it is Afghanistan, the next Copenhagen meeting, or whatever else happens.

It must be tough having to live with a persona and a rhetoric that has nothing to do with reality.

Tonight, President Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago to get the Olympics. And incidentally, if he succeeds, Chicago real estate developers, like many of his donors, will get zillions in development contracts from the city. The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass noted that  Obama is “asking the IOC to make Mayor Richard Daley the king of Chicago for life.”

It turns out that today, his pick to lead our troops (and all of NATO) in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, will be in London giving a speech about how to win in Afghanistan. I guess McChrystal he is allowed to tell our allies how we can win, just not Congress or the White House.

Perhaps Obama could stop by London and listen to the speech or chat with his general? But perhaps not. According to Kass, Obama told the head of NATO that he doesn’t have the time to chat about NATO and Afghanistan:

“I’ve got so much to do here,” Obama told NATO Secretary-General Anders Rasmussen in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “So, I will sleep on the plane. I’ll land. I’ll speak. Then fly right back.”

 At 9:18 Friday night, I got an alert from the Washington Post. Barack Obama had slapped tariffs on imports of Chinese tires. Barack Obama’s handling of this issue shows several things. First, it shows a real contempt for China, trade policy, and his international relationships more broadly. As one of my liberal friends likes to point out, this action demonstrates how the Democrats really cannot be taken seriously as the internationalist party.  And it shows the implicit contradictions in much of Obama’s economic policy.

Let’s start with the time of its announcement: 9:18pm. Really? Saturday morning in China? This tells us who the audience for this policy was: the United States. It tells us that Obama is willing to subordinate trade policy — just before the G-20 meeting no less — to domestic politics that he is embarassed about. Why else release this late on a Friday night?  (note that by statute, he didn’t have to release a response to International Trade Commission recommendations until the 17th. He picked this timing)

By Saturday afternoon, China issues scathing remarks. By Sunday, they announce counter-tariffs against US chickens and auto-parts. We have a full scale trade war.  And Asian and European markets open the week down. Thanks Barack…

So Barack Obama started a trade war for entirely domestic reasons, jeopardizing the recovery, and is afraid of the headlines here, why he doesn’t care about international opinion. How does that sound?

Now, why chickens and auto parts? I don’t immediately understand the chickens, although I suspect it is a pretty good business for us, but I understand auto parts. 

US auto parts are made by the United Autoworkers, the same union that Obama bailed out when he bailed out GM and Chrysler, two companies that had becoming wards of their union pension funds. In addition to hurting the unions, this could hurt the auto manufacturers themselves, which Obama owns and which opposed the tire tariffs because it will raise their costs. First he screwed the car companies for the UAW, now USW. Perhaps this is a lesson for when he takes over the health care sector. 

So where was the logic in this? He helps his allies, with one hand, but hurts them with the other. He hurts the economy. He hurts the government run companies. And he opens a trade war just in time for the G-20 to create real structural damage to the US economy.

Furthermore, this is how he is celebrating the anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers. By sticking the knife in the economy.

That’s change I can believe in.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Doug Schoen, (admittedly a Clinton operative) points to Barack Obama’s values problem:
Most importantly, he must answer this question once and for all: What are his values? … Exit polls in Indiana and North Carolina show clearly that fewer than 60% of white voters believe Mr. Obama shares their values. In [...]