Our Lonely First Duffer
What Barack Obama's golf game tells us about his presidency.
August 07, 2014
To many of us who play golf and generally suck at it—that's me, and most others—it is less a game than a subtle form of torture, a walking stress position. Other sports may be more physically taxing, but none tests one's character so severely—nerves, integrity, honesty and above all temper. (If you've ever four-putted from 20 feet or chunked an easy chip into a sand trap, you'll know what I mean). 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."
That quote appears in a delightful 2003 book, First Off the Tee, by the investigative journalist 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, 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.
Though a mediocre golfer, Obama is believed to be an honest scorekeeper, which perhaps should reassure us—if only a little—about the official statements coming out of his White House. He is also known for maintaining his preternaturally calm demeanor on the course as well as off. "I've never really seen him in a bad mood," frequent Obama golf partner Alonzo Mourning, the NBA great, told my POLITICO colleague Jennifer Epstein in late April, saying that Obama looked relaxed even when he was dealing with the 2013 government shutdown (from the course, of course).
But golf is revealing about this president in other ways. It has become, more and more, Obama's refuge from public life—and, perhaps, from what even some friendlier critics are wondering will be seen as a partially failed presidency. Obama himself, who has pretty much given up his first sporting love, basketball, because of a fear of injury (according to Mourning), has said that playing the game is a way "to relax and clear my head." Yet even a relatively sympathetic pundit like the Washington Post's Dana Milbank recently questioned whether it was wise for the 44th president to be tallying 180-plus rounds during his much-troubled tenure (compared with only 24 for George W. Bush in eight years), writing: "Is golf really so important that Obama is willing to handicap his political standing?"
What tells us even more about this particular president than his escapist passion for golf, however, is his routinely narrow choice of playing partners over the past five and a half years. Let's start with the basics: Golf is probably the most social of sports. It is a game virtually designed for getting to know people and expanding one's networks—for schmoozing, unmonitored understandings out in the open air and private winks over the 19th hole.The self-loathing we hackers experience while playing it is partially relieved by golf's convivial and lubricous nature (typically helped along by substantial drinking after the torture is done), as well as the opportunities for empathy, commiseration and a lot of good, manly trash talk.
President Obama (second from left) plays golf with Vernon Jordan, Marvin Nicholson and Eric Whitaker on Martha's Vineyard. | AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
To abuse Clausewitz, golf—like war—can be a continuation of politics by other means. ""You are picking up so much about people's personality traits, their humor, whether they're jerks," says David Rynecki, author of Deals on the Greens: Lessons in Business and Life from America's Top Executives. "This is even more true in politics than business because so much of politics is driven by personality, and you get a chance to know and understand that."
It is already well-known, of course, that golf is often the businessman's choice for the mysterious process of male bonding (for some reason the same doesn't hold as true for female bonding, but I'm not going there). Golf is not only social, it is irredeemably clubby, a way for our powerful one-percenters to get even cozier as they divide up our economy among themselves (you don't find many antitrust prosecutors on the links). According to a much-cited survey of business executives from 20 years ago, "Golf and the Business Executive," prepared for Hyatt Hotels by a New York-based research firm, 93 percent of those polled said playing golf was a good way to establish closer relationships with business associates, and more than a third said some of their biggest deals were done on a golf course. This has also been true of politics, and presidential golf, at times in the nation's history: Lyndon Johnson, the master of congressional vote-wrangling and a 24/7 politicker, was said to have collected senatorial yeses for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other legislation while golfing.
Yet in five and a half years of slashing his way through courses from Maryland to Hawaii, Obama 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 133 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).
At a time of unprecedented polarization between the parties—and with no one of sufficient stature out there to bridge the gap—this tells us something about Obama's "insularity" (as Van Natta expressed it to my colleague Glenn Thrush back in 2011). He is a president who relies on a small circle of trusted advisers, and he harbors a well-known distaste for hanging with the people he needs to bring over to his side—but has mostly failed to—on Capitol Hill. At a recent White House event honoring pro golfers connected with the Presidents Cup, Obama joked that he was being joined by "two of his favorite golf partners," John Boehner and Joe Biden, but in fact he's played with the House speaker only once in nearly six years, and then through gritted teeth. Even Boehner, a total golf geek himself, mocked Obama's golf-aholicism recently when he said he'd called the president to wish him a happy 53rd birthday: "He sends me an email back telling me how good his golf game is. I wanted to reply, but I didn't. … I wanted to, because I would've said a few things," Boehner said. (According to one person close to Boehner, it might have helped politically if Obama had invited the speaker to the links more often in recent years—though, to be fair, it doesn't seem as if Boehner is exactly clamoring for opportunities to bond with the president.)
Perhaps Obama's approach to golf can tell us a thing or two about his presidential legacy as well. It's fair to question whether his isolationism on the course reflects his entire approach to leadership. This president who once billed himself as an intellectual seeker has largely cut himself off, while in office, from new ideas and new discussions. Thomas Jefferson was just as private and reticent a man as Obama—and of course he didn't play golf, then confined only to Scotland—but even Jefferson used to regularly lay on big dinners for a broad mix of guests at the White House. George Washington hosted weekly meals for legislators, FDR routinely mixed cocktails himself for members of Congress and Harry Truman was famous for his bourbon-laced poker games. Obama's contacts with the Hill are often limited to big holiday or Super Bowl parties that lack any intimate conversation—the kind you can sometimes have on the golf course or in the clubhouse.
It's not just Congress; he's distanced himself from his own cabinet. Early on his advocates let it be known that he loves big policy debates. But in fact the big sloppy one that his administration had over Afghanistan—which spilled scandalously into the news in 2009-10—was so traumatic that it turned out to be one of the last. "He thinks dissent is messy," says one long-time ally who is familiar with many administration deliberations.
President Obama and Vice President Biden play golf on the White House putting green. The two have only played golf together six times. | Pete Souza/White House via Getty Images
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. As Elizabeth Warren once remarked during her days of frustration as an adviser to Obama's Treasury Department, when she discovered that the president had virtually delegated his economic policy to Tim Geithner and Larry Summers (neither of whom evinced much enthusiasm about a progressive agenda that would help homeowners as much as bankers): "Our ruling intelligentsia in economics runs the spectrum from A to A-minus. These guys all talk to each other, and they all say the same thing."
Other close observers of the Obama presidency agree. "He doesn't have the experience of hearing his read on events directly challenged across the board," says the long-time ally. And as his presidency has hardened in the arteries, Obama has grown ever more "fatalistic" about his isolated position—hastening his retreat from world events as well as Washington horse-trading.
Obama's escapist approach to golf is hardly unique for presidents, who crave nothing so much as to free themselves occasionally from the pettiness of Washington and the brutal pressure of presiding over the fate not only of the United States but the whole international system. 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. And unlike other, wealthier presidents, Obama doesn't have a private compound or ranch to run away to.
But despite those caveats, his lonely golfing sojourns should be seen as a reflection of the man as well as the president. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama described himself as a 21-year-old whose "solitude" was "the safest place I knew." That book, still by far the most revealing self-portrait of Obama we have, is mainly an account of his deeply personal journey of trying, and often failing, to fit into America as a "black man with a funny name," as he described himself—a mixed-race Hawaiian who never really knew his Kenyan father and constantly had to explain his unique existence to the Americans he met along the way.
This sense of alienation continued in his political career. Obama's brilliance as a candidate, his phenomenal ability to arouse huge crowds with inspiring speeches, meant that he didn't have to get down from the podium to do much glad-handing on the trail (in 2008 he famously complained to his staff of "too many rope lines"), or back-room dealing. Once in the White House, Obama's natural aloofness was reinforced by the almost constant hostility of the GOP-controlled House and the Republican caucus in the Senate, as well as the undercurrent of racism that has dogged his presidency.
Even now, at the acme of power, he has never fully belonged. By complaining that Republicans feared becoming "too cooperative or too chummy" with him lest they suffer at the polls, Obama had a ready excuse to revert to his natural isolation, and most often he did. "The president didn't have the schmooze gene," Jonathan Alter writes in The Center Holds, his latest account of the Obama presidency. From the time he was a boy, his sense of apartness had bred a hardened self-reliance, and he lacked the "neediness" for the affirmation of others that is usually central to a politician's makeup, Alter argues. And it was hardly just the Republicans who felt put off: "That was the essence of the problem that Democratic politicians had with him – that he floated above the fray."
George W. Bush and his father wave to the camera after teeing off in Maine, July 2002. | Paul J. Richards/Getty Images
Thanks in large part to his sudden and meteoric rise, Obama also never had to learn the basic skills of socializing with his political enemies. "Bargaining was in the background of most of Obama's predecessors," Alter writes. "Eisenhower learned to negotiate with balky allies during the Second World War, and Reagan gained bargaining experience as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Unlike Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, Obama had never been a governor herding state legislators, and his experience closing deals with the Republicans in the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate was minimal. (It was no coincidence that the last two presidents before Obama who went directly from the Senate to the White House were John F. Kennedy and Warren Harding in 1921, and neither got much done with Congress.) In Democratic Chicago he rarely had to talk to people who fundamentally disagreed with him. His self-image was that of a bridge-builder, but he came up so fast that he'd never built a big one."
Obama is acutely aware of the criticisms, and his answers often betray a defensiveness about his schmooze-gene deficiency that only seems to confirm the truth of it. "There is one thing that bothers me, which is when I hear folks saying, oh, you know, if you just play golf with John Boehner more—and we're just trying harder to be more bipartisan, then we'd get more stuff done," the president told reporters recently. "That's not the problem. On every issue we are more than happy to sit down in reasonable fashion and compromise. The problem is not that we're too mean or we're too partisan. The problem is I don't have enough votes—full stop."
Actually that's not full stop. 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.
Correction: An earlier version of this article reflected Obama's golf play through Jan. 2, 2014. The article now includes the most up-to-date numbers.
Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.
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