The White House press corps is being quite properly ridiculed for throwing a hissy fit over President Obama’s decision to ban correspondents from covering his round of golf with Tiger Woods on Sunday.
But Ed Henry, president of the White House Correspondents Association, is doing his best to defend their whining:
This isn’t about a golf game… This is a fight for more access, period.
(Politico, February 18, 2013)
With all due respect to Henry, however, this can’t be about more access to Obama. Not least because correspondents have no constitutional right to any access, and every president has, for one reason or another, banned them in similar fashion.
Instead, this is about why Obama felt the need to play with Tiger only on the down low. After all, not since political survival forced Nicodemus to meet with Jesus only in the dark of night has a meeting between a politician and a notorious citizen been executed with such secrecy.
Meanwhile, the media are replete with stories about this re-elected president being clearly unburdened by the need to pander or appease for political survival.
Which is why I am so bemused by the prevailing view among political pundits that Obama ordered this press blackout because he did not want women to see him hanging out with such a notorious womanizer. Am I the only one who sees a contradiction here…?
Mind you, this is the same president who, at the height of last year’s campaign to get re-elected, granted the press unfettered access to cover his round of golf with no less a womanizer than former President Bill Clinton. This, above all, is why I am stupefied that Obama felt the need to hide away with Tiger the way he used to hide away with cigarettes – when he was still struggling to quit.
Frankly, this should have been an occasion for national celebration: having the most famous politician in the world being treated to a round of golf (every president’s favorite game) by the most famous golfer in the world; especially given the improbable fact that they are both Black. I wish Obama had the balls to play it as such.
Tiger does not deserve to be treated like a pariah. Unlike Clinton, he never betrayed a public trust. Moreover, notwithstanding his humiliating public apology, his infidelities were nobody’s business but his and his wife’s.
So shame on Obama for playing golf but hiding Tiger; well, as if he were Tiger playing with mistress(es)….
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