WASHINGTON — Our Superman in the White House, who apparently can clear tall buildings in a single bound, has decided to jump over to Copenhagen to rescue the bid of his hometown of Chicago for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

The rationale, when he already is up to his leotards in major challenges at home, seems to be, as in his campaign rallying cry, that, yes, he can. With Air Force One at his disposal, which consumes jet fuel like a 1960s gas-guzzler, he will pull a long-distance overnighter to make the pitch.

President Obama's 11th-hour decision is being peddled by his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, as nothing more than a legitimate effort "to root for America." But it's another snap reversal from a previous call to stay home and put on a full-court press for health care reform.

Obama had already arranged to dispatch his wife to carry the flag, along with a host of fellow-Chicagoans, including his close presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett, a former chairman of the host committee.

First Lady Michelle Obama, in defending the decision to reporters at the White House, modestly described her husband as "the leader of the free world." That declaration should surely give him a leg up over the leaders of Japan, Brazil and Spain, who will be present to press the rival claims of Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid.

"You're darned if you do, and you're darned if you don't," she offered in explanation. It's probably true that her husband would have been "darned" by many in the Windy City if he didn't go, but he is very likely to be "damned" in many quarters elsewhere for this particular diversion, if only for overnight.

It feeds the impression that he continues to take on more challenges than he can reasonably handle. To be sure, many of them have been unavoidable, particularly having to cope with the economic collapse while dealing with two inherited wars.

But at a time he is engaged in a stiff fight in Congress over his signal domestic objective of health care reform, and faced with a critical decision on sending additional troops to Afghanistan or putting the brakes on another runaway war, the Copenhagen caper seems frivolous.

It's also politically risky, putting his high international popularity on the table in a crapshoot.

Chicago probably is best-known abroad, thanks to Hollywood, as the 1930s home of gangland, Al Capone and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. And the calamitous Democratic National Convention of 1968, later called a police riot by a fact-finding committee, still lingers in memory.

Once the nation's most popular venue for national political conventions, with its central location and lively nightlife, Chicago found a vacancy sign hung on it by both political parties for 28 years thereafter, until the Democrats finally returned in 1996 for the renomination of Bill Clinton.

Mayor Richard M. Daley, son of the famed Democratic boss, Mayor Richard J. Daley, who unleashed the city's police against the protesters in 1968, pulled out all the stops in a grand welcome back. Now another favorite son is demonstrating his loyalty.

Jules Witcover's latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, "Very Strange Bedfellows," has just been published.