This is hardly the first “hey, maybe Obama golfing a bunch isn’t so bad” spin from a Republican pol (Cuccinnelli, for instance), but Newt approaches it here as less of a joke about the president’s incompetence and more as an acknowledgement that the links aren’t really Obama’s getaway from the job. They’re just an extension of it.
Unlike Ike, Gingrich writes:
President Eisenhower was a very serious golfer who had been a varsity football player at West Point. Eisenhower joined Augusta and routinely played with business leaders and pro golfers.
When Ike wasn’t golfing, however, he was the best trained strategist to ever occupy the White House. From being first in his class at the Army Command and General Staff College to serving as General MacArthur’s speechwriter to rising meteorically from lieutenant colonel to general of the Armies (five stars), Eisenhower proved to be exceptionally smart and hard-working.
And unlike Reagan:
Reagan had actually learned from Eisenhower that it helped to be underestimated and seen as pleasant and not particularly intense. Reagan used to quip, “They say hard work never killed anyone, but why take chances?”
The Reagan presidency was focused on three very large goals: defeating the Soviet Empire, relaunching American economic growth, and rebuilding the spirit of American civic culture. He achieved all three.
While Reagan knew how to relax, he also knew how to focus intensely on the three goals that mattered. Look at the personal effort he put into defeating the State Department and insisting on keeping the “tear down this wall” line in his Berlin speech in 1987.
The president lacks that single-mindedness away from the course, Newt says, as evidenced by the “confusion over Syria, Iraq, ISIS, Hamas, Israel, and Libya,” for instance.
“If the economy was growing, the border was controlled, the Middle East was stabilizing and there were no outbreaks of violence in the streets of major American cities, no one would comment on the number of golf games President Obama played,” Gingrich writes.
Full essay here.
