On the menu today: The theme of today’s newsletter is how those in authority kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Like the International Olympic Committee, FIFA allowed bribery and coziness with autocratic regimes to place its biggest contest in a hellhole of a country that is disappointing fans and turning its premiere event into an exercise of increasingly unsavory moral compromises. Meanwhile, presidential primaries that are supposed to help the parties select the best person to be the next commander in chief have turned into a publicity tour for lesser-known figures who want more attention, cabinet positions, cable-news gigs, book deals, and other perks. At times, it seems like lots of people in authority have forgotten what their jobs are, and forgotten Stephen Covey’s advice: “Begin with the end in mind.”
The World Corruption Games?
Way back in 2018, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek column envisioning a World Corruption Games held in Doha, Qatar, in the year 2022 — where countries competed to demonstrate which one was the world champion in corruption and bribing international-sports administrators.
Lots of people like, or used to like, watching international sporting competitions. Some comedian used to joke that if you asked a bartender to change the bar television’s channel to the World Tiddlywinks Tournament, he would scoff, but if you told him today was Team USA vs. Russia in the World Tiddlywinks Tournament championship, within ten minutes the whole bar would be chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” Our interest in any given sport varies, but we love to see Americans win championships. When an American athlete wins, we feel like we’ve won something, too.
Those international sporting competitions would always be popular, as long as the organizations running the two biggest ones — the International Olympic Committee and FIFA — didn’t mess with the formula.
But the committees running those big international sporting competitions increasingly preferred, and more or less imposed, two expensive requirements upon the host countries. The first is multiple state-of-the-art stadiums, and the second is bribes. Over time, many major cities calculated that the costs increasingly outweighed the benefits. (Despite the IOC’s claims with fuzzy math, no city has made a profit on hosting the Olympic Games since Los Angeles in 1984.) I was in Atlanta for the 1992 Olympics, and as much as Atlantans enjoyed hosting the games, it meant bringing ordinary life to a halt for about three or four weeks. Hotels, restaurants, and other tourism-focused businesses loved it, but plenty of Atlantans grumbled that it was a spectacularly inconvenient disruption to their lives for someone else’s benefit. It’s one thing for your city to host a Super Bowl or big conference for a few days; it’s another thing for your city streets to be packed to the gills with crazy sports fans for nearly a month — and then being left with a lot of expensive stadiums that won’t be used most days.
Meanwhile, autocratic regimes believed that hosting big international sporting competitions was a way to earn prestige on the world stage, and those regimes weren’t particularly worried about losing money on the deal or disrupting the lives of their citizens. The IOC selected Sochi, Russia, for the 2014 winter games; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for 2016 — despite glaring signs that the Brazilians had exaggerated their ability to get ready in time; the relatively smoothly run Pyeongchang, South Korea, for the 2018 winter games; the delayed 2020 summer games of Tokyo that occurred in 2021; and then this past winter’s downright dystopian winter games in Beijing, which had just hosted the summer games 14 years earlier. You knew the most recent Olympics had become a disaster when the usually mild-mannered Mike Tirico, NBC Sports’ anchor for the Olympics coverage, called out the IOC on-air for utterly failing to protect Russian skater Kamila Valieva or to mitigate Russian cheating and rule-breaking.
Meanwhile, the notoriously corrupt FIFA chose Russia for the 2018 World Cup, and then selected Qatar for this year’s World Cup. The first glaring problem is that the World Cup was usually played in summer, and the usual temperature in Qatar in summer is about 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
Just as NBC’s patience with the IOC’s corruption ran out, members of the international sports media are currently asking themselves why they should play along with FIFA’s decision to treat Qatar like a normal host country:
The decision to hold the tournament in the tiny Gulf state has been shrouded by allegations of bribery, and the staging of the event has come to be regarded as a human rights tragedy. Qatar’s treatment of its migrant workers, who built the stadiums and transportation infrastructure that will be used for the World Cup, has drawn international condemnation. A report published last year by The Guardian found that 6,500 of those workers had died since the country was selected in 2010 to host the tournament.
There are also concerns over how the host nation will treat its visitors. Homosexuality is outlawed in Qatar, although, according to The Guardian, law enforcement has reportedly agreed to show restraint when confronted with public displays of affection from those in the LGBTQ community. Members of the press may not be afforded such leniency. Organizers have imposed restrictions on where and what media outlets can document, prohibiting filming or photography of residential properties, private businesses, and government facilities.
A police state can rarely change its habits, even with the whole world watching. Just as the Chinese police ended up roughing up Dutch journalist Sjoerd den Daas while he was live on camera during the Beijing winter games, Qatari police have already roughed up Irish and Danish journalists attempting to cover the World Cup.
It’s not like there is a shortage of nice cities in democratic countries! There is no good reason to pick some Persian Gulf monarchy that runs on near-slave labor and wants to ban alcoholic beverages and any display of homosexuality. You might as well put the next Disneyland in Pyongyang, North Korea.
The purpose of events such as the World Cup and Olympics is, ultimately, entertainment. Putting the games in some nutty autocracy that abuses guest workers, hates a free press, and wants to suppress anything that might deviate from its preferred narrative makes those events less entertaining to audiences in the West. Lots of people across borders and the political spectrum can look at the 1936 Olympic games in Nazi Germany and conclude, “That was terrible, they shouldn’t have held the games there.” Watching sports isn’t supposed to make you feel dirty.
The Beijing winter Olympic games had the smallest U.S. television audience of any Olympics in history, 40 percent lower than the previous winter games in South Korea. I expect you’ll see something similar for this year’s World Cup; Americans are getting ready for Thanksgiving, and the Christian world is preparing for the Christmas season. It’s just an odd, awkward time of year for the world’s biggest international soccer tournament, a schedule change that wouldn’t have been necessary if FIFA had just picked a normal country like France or Japan to host the event.
Sure, the IOC and FIFA are lining their pockets, but through their asinine decisions, they’re slowly strangling the goose that lays the golden eggs, making their events less popular and interesting to Western audiences.
What Is the GOP Presidential Primary’s Purpose?
The point of the Republican presidential primary is to select the Republican nominee for president. It is a powerful responsibility, put in the hands of those who vote in Republican primaries and caucuses. The nominee will have, most cycles, around a 50-50 chance of being the next president.
The Republican presidential primary is not designed to help lesser-known political figures get a Fox News or MSNBC gig. It is not designed to get anyone a book deal or sell those awful campaign books with titles such as Eyes on the Horizon: Building Tomorrow’s American Future Today. It is not designed to help some midlevel party figure audition for vice president or a cabinet post.
I’ve covered presidential campaigns since 2000. I remember Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes and Tommy Thompson and Duncan Hunter and Sam Brownback. I remember Ron Paul winning every straw poll by a wide margin and then not performing nearly as well in any of the real contests. I remember that Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum ran twice. I remember that Jim Gilmore ran twice. (Sorry if I’ve told the Jim Gilmore story too many times on the Three Martini Lunch podcast.)
I remember the short-lived Fred Thompson campaign, supported by lots of conservatives but not necessarily Fred Thompson.
I remember that the last GOP presidential primaries briefly featured campaigns by Rick Perry, George Pataki, Carly Fiorina, and Rand Paul. I also remember that the last Democratic presidential primaries briefly featured campaigns by Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton, John Hickenlooper, Bill de Blasio, Tim Ryan, Joe Sestak, Steve Bullock, John Delaney, and Julian Castro.
There is an excellent chance that in the coming year, at least one and probably many little-known, longshot Republican presidents will insist that everyone is dismissing them unfairly, and that once they get out there into Iowa and New Hampshire, they will surprise some people. (By the way, it’s not yet even clear if the 2024 Republican presidential primaries will proceed in the traditional order, with Iowa and New Hampshire first on the calendar.) I am reminded of the quote from Carl Sagan: “They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.”
If you really want to be the next president, you should already have an impressive list of accomplishments, and Americans should already have at least a vague sense of who you are. If you can’t meet that threshold, you’re not ready, and the presidential primary is not a career advancement tool or publicity tour. The GOP has real work to do. When yet another guy on stage thinks it really means something when he says, “I believe that children are the future, teach them well and let them lead the way,” he’s just talking to hear the sound of his own voice.
My colleagues are similarly impatient with lesser-known figures succumbing to delusions of grandeur.
Michael Brendan Dougherty laments, “We already know the Republican Party has plenty of mediocrities. Let’s not wreck the executive branch even more by turning them all out in the pageant show.” Charlie Cooke warns those aspiring candidates directly:
You’re no different from the five others who’ll run on the same platform as you. Almost nobody has heard of you, and those who have don’t care about you. Far from being an expert, you’re just another guy. And if you had the sort of charisma that leads people to spontaneously recommend you for president, you’d have known it before now.
So, don’t do it. Don’t “consider” it. Don’t “pray on it.” Don’t form an exploratory committee. Don’t meet with donors. Don’t vacation in Iowa. Instead, turn on, tune in, and drop out. A grateful country will thank you for your service to the cause.
ADDENDUM: National Review is rolling out a new video series called No Free Lunch, featuring some of our sharpest and keenest economic minds. It’s hosted by renowned wealth adviser and NRI Trustee David Bahnsen, and featuring guests such as Larry Kudlow. Episode one drops next Monday, November 8, and episode two comes out December 1. You won’t want to miss it!