Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/shields-and-brooks-on-obamas-olympic-trip-health-care Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Mark Shields and David Brooks sort through the week's news, including President Obama's trip abroad to tout Chicago's bid for the Olympics, new moves on health care reform and talks with Iran on its nuclear program. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks.All right, let's go with the big news first. Chicago loses the Olympics to Rio. Are you one of those pundits that Christine Brennan was talking about who's going to see this as a big political loss to the president?DAVID BROOKS, columnist, New York Times: No, I thought Robert Siegel of NPR had the best line, which was the old Mayor Daley would have known how to rig an election, find some dead IOC members, have them vote. Somehow the old mayor — if you can't rig an IOC election, that's a disgrace to Chicago.You know, I don't blame Barack Obama for going. He might as well give it a shot, if we didn't win for whatever reason. But, you know, so he flew over there, he got to meet Stanley McChrystal. It's almost the first time he's had face time with him. So… JIM LEHRER: They met on Air Force One. DAVID BROOKS: Basically 25 minutes. JIM LEHRER: He was already in Europe, so he went over to Copenhagen, yes. DAVID BROOKS: And so, you know, I can't get that excited — with Iran that's going on, the economy, health care, I just can't get that excited. He gave it a shot. We didn't win. JIM LEHRER: What do you think, Mark?MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: Jim, the old story about Chicago is the grandmother who wanted to be buried there, even though she didn't live there, because she wanted to remain active in politics even after her death. And that's… JIM LEHRER: That's a very old joke, Mark. MARK SHIELDS: But that's the old Chicago legend that they are good at politics. And certainly, it was proved in 2008 in the Obama campaign. They came from nowhere, a first-term senator, beat the face cards of the Democratic Party, won the highest percentage of the popular vote of any Democrat, other than Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, in the history of the country.And this was confidence — not shattering, but it was confidence-shaking. This afternoon, all people were talking about was, why did they go there? Doesn't anybody count? Where is David Plouffe, the campaign manager? At least he could count. And they started… JIM LEHRER: In other words, he should have known… MARK SHIELDS: Should have… JIM LEHRER: … what the count was going to be before he went. If he couldn't win it, don't go. Is that it? MARK SHIELDS: You've got finite — exactly. You've got finite political capital. I mean, how do you spend it? And they point to three examples of where — the question of how it's being spent.Last week, an awkward, clumsy attempt by the White House to try and get David Paterson, the unpopular and succeeded unelected Democratic governor of New York, not to run, fingerprints all over it, and you don't succeed in getting him out of the race.This week, just saw in Betty Ann's piece, the public option comes up in the Senate Finance Committee. The president is committed to it. Make no calls. Make no — the White House doesn't lift a finger. They're saying, "Well, wait a minute. Where are they?" I mean, you want to know where people are.And then today, it's a question, quite honestly, of saying, is there somebody in charge here? Are there too many loose ends? JIM LEHRER: Clearly, David, Mark sees this as a much more serious event. DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I guess, if you put it into part of a storyline of a whole series of things they're not doing so great on, it is true. I ran into some senators earlier in the week. They all assumed we had it in the bag. MARK SHIELDS: Yes. JIM LEHRER: Everybody did. DAVID BROOKS: They all said, "There's no way he would go if we didn't have it in the bag." That was the general… JIM LEHRER: Yes, he wouldn't have gone. MARK SHIELDS: I heard that Tuesday night on guarantee, that he's not getting on a plane until the votes are there. And, you know, say what you want. I mean, it was pretty impressive how Rio went from the second ballot to 46 votes. I mean, we weren't even in it. JIM LEHRER: Yes, I mean, Chicago had 18. I mean, they were… DAVID BROOKS: But that said, the Obama method seems to be: Try a lot of things. Somebody counted up the number of major initiatives the Obama administration has put together. I think it was like 154 or something like that. They're trying a lot of things. They're not going to win on them all.And I would say, on the whole, setting policy aside, just in terms of getting things passed, I don't think you could fault them for incompetence at this point. I mean, they did pass the stimulus, whether it worked or not. They're doing actually pretty well in health care, if you just count passage.So I agree that there have some stumbles, and today was one of the bad days, but I still don't think you can draw a storyline of incompetence.