Chicago has been eliminated in the first round of IOC voting. Wow—I did not see that coming. The way I figured it, this White House is far too protective of the president’s strategically crafted image to allow him to travel thousands of miles only to fail on the world stage. I thought it was a done deal—who's better at vote-counting than the Obama people? I would have bet money that Rahm and Axelrod knew they had the numbers in the bag before they let him step on Air Force One. I was so very wrong. Not only did they fail, they failed in the first round! It's a bad look for the president, especially coming on the heels of this morning’s depressing unemployment figures.     

This is pretty embarrassing for the White House. (Especially letting Obama having to fail in front of his wife—ouch!) But ultimately, it’s a good thing for him. As I wrote on Monday, the Olympics are notorious for running massively over budget. The organizing committees are always rife with infighting and power games as all manner of colorful cronies badger members to get their paws on some of those coveted Olympics dollars. Public support for the Olympics in Chicago itself was already lukewarm. Residents would have been facing seven years of disruptive construction and roadwork as their city raced to prepare itself. It’s a recipe for serious disgruntlement.

Obama would have been inextricably tied to all of this—the budget overruns, the construction hiccups, the predictable corruption. By going to Copenhagen, he became the public face of the effort. Already, some of his closest supporters and friends were on the bid committee: his campaign’s national finance chair Penny Pritzker and a co-chair of his inaugural committee, Patrick Ryan, both had key roles. Senior adviser David Axelrod’s communications firm, AKPD Media, was one of the contractors for the committee, and Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett had been involved in supporting the bid. When problems would start to arise in the planning of this mammoth event—and they invariably would have—Obama would be implicated, regardless of his actual involvement.

Olympics-related screw-ups may have no concrete bearing on Obama’s capacity to govern, but they do make easy campaign ads. It’s not hard to imagine attack ads tying whatever planning ineptitude that was making news back to the White House. And while most voters outside of Chicago wouldn’t care all that much, such issues provide an unwanted distraction for the White House. They can dominate news cycles and pull advisers, and possibly even the president, into debates that divert attention from more critical politics. Think about how ACORN sidetracked political debates on health-care reform.

This is a tad humiliating for the president, but his embarrassment will be short-lived, especially if he demonstrates some good humor about it. Republicans will probably criticize him for skipping the country for a day instead of focusing on Iran or Afghanistan, but those attacks won’t stick. He wasn’t even gone 24 hours, and General McChrystal joined him on Air Force One. This will be fodder for late-night comedians and talk-back radio for a day or two. But winning the Olympics could have bogged down his entire presidency. And this way, next time he goes to Tokyo, he'll have something in common with Prime Minister Hatoyama.