Posted on 08/08/2014 6:26:20 AM PDT by COUNTrecount
CLIP
Naturally, because golf is so hard on the psyche as well as the wallet, it is unusually revealing about the true nature of people—and, of course, presidents. “If the people wish to determine who is the best candidate, put all the contenders on the golf course,” the golfing great Gene “The Squire” Sarazen once remarked. “The one who can take five or six bad holes in a row without blowing his stack can handle the affairs of the nation.”
CLIP Don Van Natta Jr., who observed that we could learn a lot from the fact that the last 11 presidents going back to Eisenhower (with the exception of Jimmy Carter) have been fairly obsessed with the game. While detailing their worst habits on the course, Van Natta implied it was no accident that some of the biggest presidential cheaters at golf—Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton—were also some of the biggest liars in the Oval Office. Clinton, for example, was notorious for taking what Van Natta called “Billigans”—a play on “mulligan,” golfing parlance for a do-over (which is not allowed under the rules).“If you want to learn about Bill Clinton’s character problem, you don’t have to subpoena Whitewater documents,” conservative commentator Byron York once wrote. “Just watch him on the golf course.”
And what of the current First Duffer? After authorizing airstrikes in Iraq, and despite sharp warnings about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine (to say nothing of the mess in Gaza), this weekend Barack Obama is headed off for another hack-a-thon on Martha’s Vineyard—his regular August getaway—so it seems like an appropriate moment to ask what this revelatory sport can tell us about No. 44, who by all accounts has become increasingly obsessed with hitting little white balls into tiny holes.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
“Obama is believed to be an honest scorekeeper, which perhaps should reassure us”
If you seriously believe that this, if even true, translates in any way to his credibility as president, you’re nuts.
Lord I wish we could do a mulligan on this Presidency.
I’m no great golfer, but golf demands some concentration. I think Obama plays golf so he doesn’t have to think about being President. That is escapism. A little bit is OK, but he’s up to 200 golf days since he took office. Putin and ISIS know that he’s running away from the presidency. Dangerous times for the entire world when the US President can’t deal with reality. But, we elected a known Choomer.
That's racist!/s
I suspect some day the media will report that he went out and hit 18 holes in one.
Caddy:...."You teed up on an addled duck egg"
ROFLOL! I have seen his swing. For a guy that spends that much time on the golf course, his swing sucks.
> Obama is believed to be an honest scorekeeper
When you’re watching.
I’ve heard the only thing more deeply classified than Baraq’s LSATs are his golf scores.
In five and a half years of slashing his way through courses from Maryland to Hawaii, the president has managed to turn this most gregarious of games into an intensely private obsession, one he has shared almost entirely with the handful of close friends—many of them old high-school pals from Hawaii—and White House aides he asks into his foursome. Mostly, he plays with junior White House aides. So Obama spends most of his time with golf partners he not only doesn’t have to persuade—he doesn’t even have to talk to them. An exhaustive record of Obama’s every golf game over the past five and a half years compiled by Epstein and another POLITICO colleague, Carrie Budoff Brown, showed that the president’s most frequent partner, by far, has been Marvin Nicholson, the White House trip director (they’ve played together 117 times), followed by David Katz, the 29-year-old White House senior policy adviser for manufacturing, and Eric Whitaker, Obama’s old Chicago friend. Not far behind in frequency is Ben Finkenbinder, a young White House press staffer. Even Bill Clinton, while he usually played the game for fun, also used it as a venue for talking politics privately with fellow big-shots (D.C. power lawyer Vernon Jordan, among others).
.... Instead, Obama has, again and again, demonstrated that he relies on a set of advisers that is as narrow as his selection of golf partners—trusted consiglieres like Valerie Jarrett and Denis McDonough (who as deputy national security adviser could sometimes be found conferring privately with the president to the consternation of McDonough’s boss, first-term national security adviser Jim Jones, a big-name former general who never had the key to the Obama inner sanctum). The same held true for his response to the economic crisis. Even after the biggest economic setback since the Great Depression, progressive economists found themselves cut out, or invited to the White House once or twice for pro-forma dinners but never again—an experience not unlike Obama’s one-off golf game with Boehner.
And finally, from the article, concluding paragraph:
“The problem is that this president doesn’t seem to possess the skills or the desire to get enough votes—full stop. He certainly hasn’t tried very hard to woo wayward members of the opposite party, as many presidents before him have done. And he’s certainly not going to make much progress by spending five hours a day addressing a little white ball—and no one else—on Martha’s Vineyard.”
“In Obama’s case, this has given rise to the caged “bear” meme that his staffers use to describe his eagerness to get away from his crushing schedule.”
Crushing schedule? The only crushing thing he has is his crush on Reggie Love.
Gimme a break! He gets up at 10 every day, maybe reads some national security notes from the briefings he never attends, has lunch, maybe has a meeting with sycophants who will stroke his ego, hosts a dinner for some celebrity or attends a fundraiser, and then goes to bed. Crushing schedule, my --
“Our Lonely First Duffer” is an empty suit puppet of his hard left handlers. He simply carries out their orders. He has loads of free time between orders.
Maybe he’s crushing grapes for all the whining he does?
How do we even know if he's really playing golf? Maybe he is driven to some other location.
“a mediocre golfer”?
Come on man, this is crappola from one of obammy’s people.
Mud man swings like an 8 year old girl.
mediocre? how about pathetic???
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