Sunday, December 2, 2012

A Round of Golf for Presidents 42 and 44

President Obama took advantage of unseasonably warm December weather on Sunday to head to the golf course with his most prominent campaign surrogate, former President Bill Clinton.

The two hit the links at a course at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington, along with Mr. Clinton’s close friend, Terry McAuliffe, the fundraiser running for governor of Virginia, and Ron Kirk, the president’s trade representative who is expected to step down soon.

White House officials did not know what the two presidents were talking about as they whacked the ball, but they presumed that the looming fiscal crisis would probably come up. Mr. Clinton, after all, is the last Democratic president to engage in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations with Congressional Republicans over spending and tax issues and is rarely shy about offering advice if asked.


Mr. Clinton and Republicans led by Speaker Newt Gingrich went off their own fiscal cliff in the 1990s when their failure to negotiate a budget deal led to a couple of government shutdowns. But eventually after a long, arduous few years of maneuvering and brinkmanship, the two sides came together for an agreement to balance the budget. In the end, the government reached surplus several years in a row before Mr. Clinton left office.
Whatever was discussed, Sunday’s golf outing will be seen as the continuation of a four-year thaw between the 42nd and 44th presidents. Mr. Clinton was openly contemptuous of Mr. Obama in 2008 when his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was running for president, and Mr. Obama seemed dismissive of Mr. Clinton’s record as president, making clear he did not consider him a transformative figure.

But over the last four years, with Mrs. Clinton now in the cabinet as secretary of state, the two presidents have slowly put that behind them. Mr. Clinton became especially important to Mr. Obama as an ally on the campaign trail this fall. Mr. Clinton’s convention speech was deemed by many Democrats as better than Mr. Obama’s, and the two traveled together at times, including in the final days of the campaign.

Mr. Obama cheerfully acknowledged his predecessor’s skill at articulating his own policies and record, dubbing him the Secretary of Explaining Stuff.

Sources : http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com