Ring Toss

Philly Loses Out on the '16 Games; Can There Be a Silver Lining?

PHILADELPHIA LOST again yesterday, but this time, the defeat was a noble one. This time, the entire region can take pride in the effort. The U.S. Olympic Committee yesterday scratched Philadelphia and Houston off the American cities it is considering to pitch as host city of the 2016 Olympics, and that's very much too bad. But the fact that the region even made a push at all -- well, given the staggering parochialism and backward-looking thinking that fatally anchor our aspirations, it was revolutionary. Alas, it would seem that those very anchors might have been what held us down in this case:

"Reading between the lines, it's clear that our international reputation was our main flaw," said David L. Cohen, executive vice president of Comcast Corp. and cochair of Philadelphia 2016, the local organizing committee. "And it was the one thing we had no capacity to address in the time frame that was available."

Wouldn't it be grand if the entire Philadelphia region could use this noble defeat as a wake-up call? Instead of continuing to self-loathe our way into a second-tier American city, we should take a good, long, hard look at what exactly our international reputation is and how we can fix it. The first part shouldn't be so difficult -- too much crime, too much union entrenchment, too much political corruption, too much unacceptable underperformance in our schools. And those are just the easy things to pinpoint. How to fix them all, well, that's the hard part. But we won't get the answers unless we start asking the questions.

Comments

[gr]

besides all the practical solutions you cite, phiully would need an all-out public relations coup to claw its way upward. decades of press about unruly attitudes and behavior are too daunting to erase with anything less.

congratulations on the new job, by the way.

[Matt]

"Instead of continuing to self-loathe our way into a second-tier American city, we should take a good, long, hard look at what exactly our international reputation is and how we can fix it. The first part shouldn't be so difficult -- too much crime, too much union entrenchment, too much political corruption, too much unacceptable underperformance in our schools. And those are just the easy things to pinpoint. How to fix them all, well, that's the hard part. But we won't get the answers unless we start asking the questions."

Is it me, or does this sound an awful lot like the beginning of a campaign kickoff speech?

[Drama Queen]

Here to report one small victory for the city of Philly- David Bell is no longer our 3rd baseman...thank goodness!