Who’s your caddy? (ap photo)
President Obama headed to the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base on Sunday for some recreation. It was about a thousand degrees kelvin in D.C., but the first family spent the weekend at the White House and the president gets notoriously restless hanging around at home.
Rounding out the foursome were Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, U.S. Trade Rep. Ron Kirk and Marvin Nicholson, a former Obama campaign aide who famously parlayed a gig caddying for John Kerry into a job on the 2004 campaign.
A Golf.com story last year did a fairly extensive photo analysis of Obama golfing in Hawaii and surmised the POTUS is a bit of a duffer but “fun to play with.”
Obama’s follow-through is not a thing of beauty, but there’s much to admire here: the cargo shorts (nothing says regular-joe golfer like cargo shorts), the little baseball cap that brings to mind the little caps worn by touring everyman Joe Durant, the casual pushed-down socks. We might need golf fashion guru Woody Hochswender to explain the pushed-down sock look and who it works for and why, but in any event the president-elect is not looking like a man who is taking his vacation golf too seriously.
That Obama is out there playing is another noteworthy policy departure from the previous administration. President Bush gave up the links after launching the invasion of Iraq, surmising it looked unseemly and sent the wrong message. Obama may have hit the links, but the White House still kept news photographers far away — now that he’s president, there are no actual shots of him playing.
