Obama and the Copenhagen Syndrome

It's dangerous to believe in your own miracles.
Stockholm Syndrome: "A term used to describe the positive bond some kidnap victims develop with their captor."

Copenhagen Syndrome: The peculiar psychology of Barack Obama's first year in office.
Let's expand on that a bit. In September, Mr. Obama paid a semi-impromptu visit to Copenhagen to make a personal appeal for Chicago's 2016 Olympic bid. It failed. The nice way to think about it: The president was trying to win one for Team America. Less nice: It was a feckless and unpresidential errand on behalf of the Chicago political machine to which he remains beholden.
And then there's the possibility that Mr. Obama really believed that he alone could pull the rabbit out of the hat. Not Dick Daley, not the First Lady. This one would require the full Barack abracadabra.

Mr. Obama was back in Copenhagen a couple of months later, this time for the U.N.'s climate summit. It was a chronicle of a fiasco foretold. In the run-up to the conference, dozens of press accounts noted the gaps between the otherworldly idealism of "Hopenhagen" boosters and the calculated realism of China and India. A politically rational president would either have stayed away or made an appearance at the beginning of the conference, so as to be far from the scene of the crime when it ended.

Instead, the president chose to raise expectations by showing up at the end of the conference, as if he were sure that the magic would not fail him twice. It did. "The debacle of Copenhagen is also Barack Obama's debacle," editorialized Der Spiegel, a left-of-center publication. No points in old Europe for the old college try. Read more.