The chin-strokerati are all aquiver over Pres. Obama’s trip to Copenhagen to flack Chicago for the 2016 Olympic Games venue.

GOPniks, on the other hand, say Obama should stick to his knitting at home (see: Republican stonewalling on health care), while the wee-wee set worries about possible fallout if Chicago comes up short in the five-ring bakeoff.

(That, of course, would trigger the five-ring White House “Blame It On Rio” defense, which, as we know, never works.)

As for Obama’s Danish Dash, New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins nails it (as she so often does):

Truly, it is not the sort of mission you want to whine about if your party’s last chief executive spent more than one-third of his presidency hanging out at Camp David or clearing brush outside Crawford, Tex.

Then there’s the whole Chicago-As-Perennial-Second-City thing.

The great A.J. Liebling, in his 1952 book Chicago: The Second City, called the Chicago skyline “a theatre backdrop with a city painted on it.”

Beyond that, Liebling mocked the hometown Chicago Tribune’s longtime boosterism :

The Tribune in the twenties used to print daily on its editorial page a ‘Program for Chicagoland,’ of which Article 1 was ‘Make Chicago the First City of the World.’ Now it doesn’t bother.

Chicago also might want to consider the buyer’s remorse in certain quarters of London, the 2012 Olympic venue.

As the feller says, be careful what you wish for.

UPDATE: The first-round knockout of Chicago also dealt a blow to Obama. From the Wall Street Journal:

The vote for Rio rebuffed a Chicago bid that appeared flat and uninspired against Mr. da Silva’s populist approach. The rebuff was an embarrassment to the president: Mr. Obama flew to Copenhagen overnight to deliver a seven-minute speech to the IOC Friday morning. First lady Michelle Obama spent much of this week in Copenhagen lobbying IOC members. Chicago television personality Oprah Winfrey also joined the campaign.

Heading into the vote, the conventional wisdom among Olympics watchers, bookmakers, and IOC members was that this was a two-city race between Rio and Chicago. But other than the speeches from the Obamas, Chicago’s presentation left the delegates largely silent and unemotional.

And the result left Chicagoans just the opposite.