Oct. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Most of the time those complaining that President Barack Obama is doing too much really wish that he were doing nothing at all. It’s not that he is spreading himself too thin but that he is spreading himself too wide -- over health care, executive bonuses and kid’s homework, while pandering to dictators at the United Nations.

Some of the complaints seem justified until you look at who is making them. The most virulent critics of the president’s ubiquity and spending wouldn’t support health-care reform if it were free. None of them were much bothered by President George W. Bush’s visits to schoolrooms, but done by Obama at lunch time and it morphs into an effort to indoctrinate the country’s children.

But some of his critics do have a point when they wonder why he’s flying off to the land of Hamlet, Tivoli Gardens and Tuborg beer to make a final plea for the 2016 games the week his military and foreign policy teams are meeting in a marathon session on Afghanistan and Congress is voting on health care.

I rarely have common ground with Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri. He’s compared waterboarding to the sensation of swimming, and closing the Guantanamo prison to inviting terrorists to move next door. Still, Bond has a point when he says “it’s baffling that the president has time to travel to Copenhagen, to be on ‘Letterman’ and every channel except the Food Network, and, yet, he doesn’t have time to talk with and listen to his top general.”

Showing Up Pele

Let’s hope General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, wasn’t hoping for a meeting tomorrow. That’s when Obama will be busy upstaging Brazil’s soccer star Pele and Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. According to Bond, who is keeping track, it’s been more than two months since the president had the kind of face time with McChrystal that he’s giving the International Olympic Committee.

No U.S. president has ever made a personal appeal. Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair got the arms race going with his trip in 2005 to Singapore to nail the 2012 Olympics for London. Obama, smarting from losing a huge fighter jet purchase by Brazil to France, told Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that Chicago would beat out Rio de Janeiro for the games. Lula, making the trip to Copenhagen, told Obama to be prepared “for his second defeat.”

Michelle Obama was already going on the kind of one-off, feel-good mission usually reserved for the first lady or vice president. With Oprah Winfrey tagging along, the IOC now gets the two most influential people in the world.

In the Bag

Obama’s defenders say the president wouldn’t be spending so much capital if he didn’t know Chicago had won the games already. If that’s the case, he is using his precious time to tie a knot on something that’s already in the bag. If he’s going because he’s been told that if he doesn’t they will take the games back, this doesn’t bode well for realpolitik. What kind of signal does that send to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, busily waving his nuclear toys?

The worst reason for the president to go begging is that it is a fool’s errand. America goes after what looks shiny and big, only to end up with so much less. There is a lesson in so many cities that have wooed a national team to town, issued bonds to pay for a stadium and watched as wealthy patrons on expense accounts scooped up the skyboxes for clients.

Dwindling Support

Polls show that about half of Chicagoans are wary of the games coming, citing the cost, the traffic, the general hassle felt by all for the attendance of the few well-connected ticket holders. Yes, there’s the magic of the torch passing, the opening night parade, national anthems playing as exhilarated athletes bow to accept the gold medal. But the magic happens for most of us on TV, even if the Games are in our hometown.

Most of Obama’s trips are no fun at all. Last week at the UN, he rarely looked happy, avoiding an inadvertent encounter with his enemies, barely speaking to ostensible friends like U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Pummeled for not being tougher on America’s badly behaving enemies, he must have wanted to tell Muammar Qadaffi to “tear down this tent.” If he had, it would have been an international incident, and we still would be watching footage of the billowing white canvas on Donald Trump’s lawn in Bedford, New York, a week later.

Presidents rarely get to act like kids, and Obama exults in his I (Heart) Chicago boosterism. Loading up Air Force One for Copenhagen is like piling on the bus for an away game for the championship with all your best friends. For Obama, who didn’t get much of that as a teenager and is beaten up daily for being The Other, what could be more American than cheering for the home team?

National Pride

If the president comes back triumphant, it will have been a day well spent to bring home an international prize and fresh source of national pride. If he fails, those inclined to give the president a break will praise his hustle and conclude the best team didn’t win this time.

For the many others in Washington, who whine if he goes on “Face the Nation,” the jetting-off is fresh evidence the president is overexposed and under-focused. Health care, Afghanistan, Iran and a stubbornly high unemployment rate are burning a hole in the country’s psyche no games can cure.

(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 30, 2009 21:00 EDT