Obama Trails Ike, Clinton In Rounds Played Division

In anticipation of his big showdown with Speaker Boehner, Glenn Thrush of Politico crunches the numbers and talks to folks about President Obama's golf and comes to some interesting conclusions.

A POLITICO analysis of 64 of the 71 rounds Obama has played since taking office shows that his golf circle has actually gotten much tighter over the past 2 1/2 years, narrowing from a group of about two dozen pals, administration officials and Cabinet members to a dozen or so trusted partners.

On most weekends this spring, Obama had the same three golf buddies: White House trip director Marvin Nicholson; former campaign photographer David Katz, whose 1.8 handicap made him No. 9 on Golf Digest’s recent ranking of Washington power brokers and press aide Ben Finkenbinder, who played golf at Minnesota’s Macalester College and ranks No. 32.

And regarding the amount he plays...

Obama is playing more than former President George W. Bush, who gave up the game during the Iraq War. And comparisons with Jimmy Carter fall flat — the ascetic Georgian hated the game. But Obama hits the links with far less frequency than Dwight Eisenhower’s two-rounds-a-week habit and falls about 20 rounds a year short of Clinton’s pace of 50 rounds a year.

There is also a video with clips from the Robert Gibbs remarks that started the entire quest to get America's two leading politicos on the links.