While the liberal media elite crows that the Republicans face this problem and that in the new year, they are still kissing up to Obama’s golf game. The New York Times ran an article on Sunday titled “Obama Is the Nation’s Private Golfer in Chief.”
Obama never leaks his scores to the media and rarely lets anyone film his game, but Times reporter Michael Schmidt dwelled on how Obama’s golf game shows what a sweet, unruffled guy he is, making him a good president.
One of the golfers who played with Mr. Obama said the way the president carried himself on the course provided significant insight into his character.
“If you came down from Mars and saw his disposition on the golf course, you would think he would be a pretty good president,” the golfer said. “He’s honest, he keeps his composure through terrible adversity, he’s unruffled, he smiles, and he doesn’t quit.”
But little is known about the state of his game and what he is like on the golf course, where he has spent roughly 1,000 hours playing 214 rounds since he was elected in 2008, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS correspondent who has kept track of the president’s schedule.
“He needles you in the best sense of the word,” said one of the three golfers who have played with him, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified as criticizing the president, and because he hoped to be asked to play with him again. “He makes a bad shot, and he makes fun of himself. You make a bad shot, and he makes a joke with you. He just seems happy to be out there, so the poor play doesn’t bother him.”
Although Mr. Clinton routinely gave himself “presidential pardons” for mulligans and gimmes, Mr. Obama is known as a stickler for the rules, the golfers who have played with him said.
What? Can’t he use “executive actions” to go around the other rule-makers? Schmitz played fast and loose by using author Don Van Natta to ooze about how Obama ordered the takedown of Osama and played golf on the same day. It went unmentioned that Obama-boosting Van Natta spent 16 years as a reporter for ....The New York Times.
Don Van Natta Jr., an ESPN reporter and author of First Off the Tee: Presidential Hackers, Duffers and Cheaters From Taft to Bush, said that even before that round, Mr. Obama had been criticized more than any other president for playing golf. [?]
“It hasn’t curtailed his schedule,” Mr. Van Natta said. “This in itself shows how important the game has become for him. On the morning Bin Laden was killed, Obama squeezed in nine holes of golf. In a way, the day was a rebuttal to all the criticism of Obama’s golf and the round counting because it showed he can hit the links and still do his job as commander in chief.”
Schmitz even lowers himself to defending Obama’s (non-leaked) scores, rebutting the idea that Michael Jordan thinks the president’s game is (expletive deleted). Obama canceling someone’s wedding on the 16th green on his Hawaii vacation is just a cute setting for more chatter about his low scores:
While Mr. Jordan’s assessment may have been true a few years ago, clues have seeped out in recent months that Mr. Obama consistently scores in the 80s now.
In an interview with Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times in August, Mr. Obama crowed that he had just had the lowest round of his life.
“Had an 80 last week,” Mr. Obama said, adding that he had a “15-foot putt for 79. I was feeling pretty good. I missed it by about that much.”
Last week, the president said in a telephone conversation with a military couple — forced to move their wedding from the 16th hole of a local course because Mr. Obama was playing there — that he had shot a 12-over-par 84.
“If they had just mentioned that they were going to have a wedding on the 16th hole, we would have skipped the 16th hole,” said Mr. Obama, who apparently parred the 16th, a par-5 hole, that day.
“If I had skipped the 16th hole, I would have shot a 79," he said.
