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.
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.”