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 friendsmany of them old high-school pals from Hawaiiand 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 doesnt have to persuadehe doesnt even have to talk to them. An exhaustive record of Obamas every golf game over the past five and a half years compiled by Epstein and another POLITICO colleague, Carrie Budoff Brown, showed that the presidents most frequent partner, by far, has been Marvin Nicholson, the White House trip director (theyve played together 117 times), followed by David Katz, the 29-year-old White House senior policy adviser for manufacturing, and Eric Whitaker, Obamas 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 partnerstrusted 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 McDonoughs 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 againan experience not unlike Obamas one-off golf game with Boehner.
And finally, from the article, concluding paragraph:
“The problem is that this president doesnt seem to possess the skills or the desire to get enough votesfull stop. He certainly hasnt tried very hard to woo wayward members of the opposite party, as many presidents before him have done. And hes certainly not going to make much progress by spending five hours a day addressing a little white balland no one elseon Marthas Vineyard.”
How do we even know if he's really playing golf? Maybe he is driven to some other location.
Well, according to the article, he made up a list of congress critters, invited each one over ONCE to play tennis, and that was the end of his outreach. Obama truly is the extension of the Carter administration.