Just a quick summary:
– Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested a boycott of the 2014 Olympics might be in order over the Snowden case.
– To which House speaker John Boehner said, “No.”
– And the U.S. Olympic Committee said, “*&%$! no.”
That’ll probably be the end of it.
For what’s it worth…
Jimmy Carter, the prime mover for the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games, was unelected in 1980 in the worst election defeat suffered by an incumbent president since Herbert Hoower in 1932. There were many reasons Carter lost to Reagan in 1980, but I don’t recall the boycott having much popular support, or gaining any political capital for Jimmy Carter But people just seemed to accept it.
Let us not forget that the Soviet Union was by far the premier Olympic Sports superpower in those years. If the United States had shown up to the 1980 Moscow Games it would have been a foil for the Soviet Union which would have dominated and did dominate the 1980 Olympics. By boycotting over the Afghanistan Invasion, the United States avoided that fate.
The argument in 1980 that was used for the boycott was that the United States should have boycotted the 1936 Berlin Olympics which Hitler used as a showpiece for Nazi Germany. Of course, if the United States had boycotted the 1936 Berlin Olympics, who would know who Jessie Owens was….