‘He’s not Jimmy Carter. He’s Tiger Woods’
Tom Maguire takes one for the team, and reads Thomas Friedman’s latest column so you don’t have to. Though if you did, you’d come across passages such as this:
Obama is smart, decent and tough, with exactly the right instincts about where the country needs to go. He has accomplished a lot more than he’s gotten credit for — with an opposition dedicated to making him fail. But lately he is seriously off his game. He’s not Jimmy Carter. He’s Tiger Woods — a natural who’s lost his swing. He has so many different swing thoughts in his head, so many people whispering in his ear about what the polls say and how he needs to position himself to get re-elected, that he has lost all his natural instincts for the game. He needs to get back to basics.
“My goodness — Obama is re-imagined as Tiger Woods (and then Kevin Costner) while Friedman recycles Dem talking points and offers absurd political advice,” Maguire writes:
Friedman delivers a Big Finish which takes us back to golf and Obama’s missing mojo. Hang on:
Meanwhile, Mr. President, on a rainy day, rent the movie “Tin Cup.” There is a great scene where Dr. Molly Griswold is trying to help Roy “Tin Cup” McAvoy, the golf pro, rediscover his swing — and himself. She finally tells him: “Roy … don’t try to be cool or smooth or whatever; just be honest and take a risk. And you know what, whatever happens, if you act from the heart, you can’t make a mistake.”
Hmm. As a metaphor for the Obama administration I prefer the scene where Obama – sorry, Roy McAvoy – smacks the ball into the water about fourteen times in a row, hoping for a better result each time. Maybe the tee is at Gitmo. Or the water hazard is the economy…
Along the way, Friedman proffers this advice to the president:
It’s crazy what’s happening in America today: We’re having an economic crisis and the politicians are having an election — and there is almost no overlap between the two. The president needs to bring them together. But that can only happen if he stops playing not to lose and goes for broke himself. Our problems are not insoluble. We need a Grand Bargain — where each side gives something on spending, taxes and new investments — and we’re on our way out of this.
Go for broke — gee, where have we heard that phrase before recently? Amazing how NBC, the WaPo and the NYT can all really move in unison at times, isn’t it? As Maguire responds:
Oh, brother. Now the recycled Dem talking pointabout those intransigent Republicans and the collapse of the Boehner/Obama “Grand Bargain”:
Obama surprised everyone by broaching the idea during the debt negotiations of a “Grand Bargain” — roughly $3 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade and $1 trillion in tax increases — as a signal to the markets that we’re getting our fiscal house in order. It was absolutely the right idea — as long as it is coupled with investments in infrastructure, education and research — but House Speaker John Boehner could not deliver his Tea Party-led G.O.P. caucus.
Well, that is Team Obama’s spin. Here in reality, Boehner agreed to $800 billion in tax hikes, the Gang of Six from the Senate put in a bid for for a higher number, so Obama backpedaled on his agreement and asked for $1.2 trillion in new revenue. Boehner couldn’t deliver the Tea Party? Obama couldn’t even deliver himself.
But does Friedman really want to use the Obama=Tiger Woods analogy? Because some enterprising blogger might just have a copy of this magazine on a shelf somewhere, drop it into the flatbed scanner, and OCR a few highlights of the text — which doesn’t appear to be online (fancy that). It’s a reminder of the infamous moment when both men were at the zeniths of their careers, before they each began crashing down to earth:
That’s the January 2010 issue of Golf Digest, which was first announced on the Web in late November of 2009, shortly before the Tiger Woods scandal broke. As I mentioned in a Silicon Graffiti video I did on the cover in early 2010, Woods’ peccadilloes permanently shattered his carefully built and rigorously-defended narrative. And by the time it broke, it transformed Golf Digest’s cover story, “10 Tips Obama Can Take From Tiger” — already a ludicrous premise — into a modern-day camp classic. The Photoshopped cover illustration that Golf Digest created features Tiger Woods caddying for President Obama, but the real caddies are on the inside; Friedman and company remind readers that hack is not a term reserved exclusively for the fairways.
Friedman is a parody, he’s become a stand-up comic, laughable.
You can picture him as a vaudeville act not a serious journalist.
Just think how stupid anyone would have to be to take Friedman seriously.
Scary.
Friedman knows as much about golf as he does about capitalism. He butchers both on a regular basis here.
The situation that allows comparisons between Tiger and Obama are rife with jarring examples, none of which does Friedman understand or appreciate.
Tiger was prickly and distant from fans. He was surly and aloof and a very poor ambassador for the game. He was in it …but not “of” it, almost all the time acting as if “above it”. He was arrogant and haughty, dictatorial and imperial.
He did not like the masses and often treated them with disdain.
His fall from grace was all his own doing, he fired his coach, he fired his caddy, he threw everyone under the bus and his behavior toward his own responsibilities and for those under his own “charge” was reprehensible. He was reckless and irresponsible. He gave lip service to the “shellacking” he took, but he never showed signs of real remorse. Instead, he found blame in others rather than himself.
He lost his “swing” and all the magic that once elevated him to the top. He’s more often now a duffer, a hacker, far off course and always scrambling just to put up something pedestrian and mediocre. He has been found out. Fresh faces no longer fear him, much less worship him. He has fallen from grace and can’t get up.
He has a guilty conscience that does not let him focus on the task at hand…and you simply can’t do this …handle this game…when your mind tells you …no matter how hard you try to block it out from doing so..that your whole facade is a fraud.
The “image”…the “persona” is at war with the flesh and bones and sinew….and mind. You try to command your body to smash another drive down the middle of the fairway, but your guilty conscience wants to expose you for the fraud you are…and has you hit it 60 yards off line, into another hazard…or out of bounds. It punishes you from the inside, it makes you expose yourself for who and what you are…despite your best efforts to keep up the charade.
You say your a champion to yourself and anyone who will listen, but your inner conscience says your a chump…and it wants to prove it to the world. You are supposed to be a pro and you can barely break 80.
Obama (and Friedman) have no use for capitalism. That is the PGA Tour. They have no use for Middle America (which they call “The Tea Party” as a code name and a safe harbor for hurled epithets, sexual slurs and other slander). Those are the fans…who pay for the purses. The “taxpayers” if you will.
The propaganda machine likes the comparison to a half-black man, struggling to regain his form. But they miss the most salient point.
They are both in a death spiral of their own making. It is their own reprehensible actions that have cost them everything. The only difference between them, is Tiger actually had the talent to do the job…and he has squandered it. He has lost the “image” he so carefully crafted…but, he had substance behind it once.
Obama always lacked substance. He never had the “fundamentals”, he simply had his name stitched on an oversized bag. The mass media stooges and lackeys want to carry that bag for him. But it won’t hide the fact in the end…that everything he tries goes way, way, way too far to the left. And on this course we call America, that’s where all the trouble is.
Very well said. Almost as good as the article in many ways.
Be Tiger woods, eh?
Why not be Meadowlark Lemon? Quit all the fancy-schmancy trick moves and just concentrate on the basics. Maybe you’ll win one finally against the hicks playing against you.
Why not be Harpo Marx? You’ve been too silent on the deficit. Speak up more and blow your own horn!
Why not be Thomas Friedman? You don’t have a clue, but spouting Leftist drivel gets you pats on the back in all the right social circles (and, dang!, it’s good to live in a mansion away from the rabble). Keep spouting stuff that makes no sense at all and hanging out exclusively with the echo chamber crowd. What are they going to do, fire you?
Just like Friedman fantasy economics, the day of reckoning will never come, because you’re Thomas Everlovin’ Friedman. Women want you, men want to be you, and differently gendered want to make up their minds about you!
As I wrote in 2009: Barack Obama is not Tiger Woods, he’s Michelle Wie.
Read the whole thing here: http://lnsmitheeblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/president-obama-tiger-woods-or-michelle.html
“if he stops playing not to lose and goes for broke himself. ”
He is the President. He is not playing for himself. He is playing for us. He does not get to “go for broke”, because we are the ones who go broke.
These idiots need to stop being so invested in this guy that they cheer more for him than for the country that he is supposed to serve. They care more that he be popular than that their country does well. Their priorities are all screwed up. He’s a failure. Leftist policies are failures. Deal with it.
cfbleachers: You didn’t mention Tiger threw his wife and kids under the bus. Throwing a coach & caddy under the bus could be a business move, but the wife and kids were family. You never leave your wingman, and you never, never, never throw your family under the bus, two important exceptions to the ‘never say never’ rule. I also agree he was not a good ambassador for the sport, although, in his defense, thousands of kids, black and white, were probably inspired by him to take up golf, when they may not have otherwise.
LNSmithee: Good analogy. Wie & Obama do seem to have a lot in common: high expectations, low performance. Similar to what happened with Wie, I liken Obama to the rookie NFLer who gets a huge bonus & contract, without ever having played a single NFL down, then falters once he actually plays in a game. How many NFL rookie busts have there been over the years? Jamarcus Russell, Leaf, Carr, Harrington, Dayne, Couch, Shuler, Ware, Ki-Jana et al, the list goes on and on. Obama is simply another rookie flame-out (although there is at least one major difference: the aforementioned NFL busts had high performances prior to the NFL). NFL rookies & golf pros can be fired for non-performance; the problem for us is that we can’t fire Obama until 11-6-12.
Friedman actually told Howard Kurtz recently that it’s “way too early to tell if the media blew it” re: their slobbering love affair with Obama. If Friedman had any credibility remaining, which I doubt, it’s gone now.
It is one thing to be a talented college football player who cannot make the leap to the NFL…quite another to be a talentless community organizer who, when elected to the state senate, excelled in voting “present”, only to be vaulted to the U.S. Senate (no accomplishments whatsoever)and then to the Presidency
The notion that a no-talent, low-level street agitator without any career accomplishments could get elected President was previously thought to be the fantasy of Hollywood screenwriters. That “fantasy” is now our nightmare.
Henry: That’s a very good point. Obama’s ascension is more comparable to a bench-rider from a Div II school getting drafted in the first round, holding out through training camp, and then being handed a starting job in the first week of the season — because he’s the son of one of the team’s owners.
I am thankful every day I get up I don’t have to read Thomas Friedman’s columns in the times. I know I have Tom Maguire and PJM to thank for that; you both have my undying gratitude.
Forget the Woods comparison, Tom is a tad dumb & didn’t think it through. What is interesting is the way these perverted souls ignore an immense failure, like ignoring an elephant in your easy chair. Hundreds of billions gone, shot, and they want more. The very marriage of fanaticism and ignorance, the lust & need to ignore what discomforts their troubled minds.
Besides, Obama is a dope. Admit that and it reflects on the left.
2. cfbleachers – excellent point by point – a virtual ‘hole in one’, if you pardon.
I would add this, expecially regarding the astute observation how both Friedman and the President he shills for openly display contempt for those they claim to want to devote their considerable talents toward, namley all us drones struggling in flyover country.
As for golf movie comparisons, the really appropriate film for these two is THE LEGEND OF BEGGAR VANCE.
Obama, as he has been ever since he decided to become a Senator – as much a path to selling more books as it was a political career move – is the MAGIC NEGRO – just like Will Smith in the made for TV Hollywood version Beggar Vance.
In our race obsessed society who besides Obama, a marginally successful thirty something of little distinction until he wrote DREAMS, who until that memroir’s publication was muddling through with one foot in academia and the other in obscurity in the Illinois State Senate, basically depending on his wife to lift the family income while he ‘found himself’, could perpetrate such a pompus coup?
Ask James Frey about being White, loosing the fine line between fact and fiction, then cash in on Oprah, only to face the music when some fact checker at the Nation caught wiff of a red, white and blue lie.
Yes his Harvard connections can account somewhat for why an otherwise undistinguished hail fellow (I mean he was the Law Review Editor – ususally a launching pad for a stellar law career once having gone on to clerk for a state or US Supreme Court justice) recieved a six-figure advance WHEN SAID PUBLISHER HAD LITTLE EVIDENCE OF HIS HAVING WRITTEN MORE THAN AN OCCATIONAL OPT-ED FOR THE CHICAGO African-American Newspaper!
Yet over the course of several years – and on the eve of his publisher dropping him and demanding the huge advance back – he pulls DREAMS FROM MY FATHER out of his arse.
And the perfect political Tiger – MAGIC NEGRO/BEGGER VANCE – was born from Progressive central-casting.
I saw a riviting C-Span discussion this past week that illustrates perfectly what cfbleachers discusses. It was a panel consisting of George Packer (writer the Nation) and two very distinguished presidential historians – Robert Caro & H. W. Brands – moderated by Lynn Sherr – in New York City.
Just like Friedman – these people gushed about Obama as if the country was exeriencing a fiscal and economic renaissance! Besides his amazing poise and brilliant intellect, and his FDR-like political skills when swatting away the puny Republicans trying to tear him down, he, despite a difficult ‘bad luck’ ecomony, was undoubtably headed for re-election.
The hour long discussion was like an X-ray into the delusional frame of reference of the die-hard progressive mind set – getting beamed up to planet Liberal with a capital L.
Not one critical word. Nor any mention of dissapointment. Sure Tavis Smiley and Cornell West may have mosied off the reservation with their ‘Poverty Tour’, and the Congressional Black Caucus may be getting all riled up – BECAUSE their ‘community’ -unlike these diehards living comfortable well feed lives – float far above and away from the misery folks at the bottom AND IN THE MIDDLE are dealing with living through the O’s transformative 2 year reign of terror.
When you look at Obama’s brief career before he LUCKED into a financial panic his party had already utilized for total congressional dominance – it was one long trip full of oppertunistic upwardly mobile failure…failure to do anything of distinction…the kind of distinction which prepares and tests the abilities of a man or woman to be our president.
A true intellectual, and a conservative genius, Professor Richard Epstein, gave a great review on Obama to Reason.TV – having seen him up close for years when he also taught at Chicago U. His version is quite different from the hagography we reguarly get from folks like Friedman in the media – and echoed at the NYC roundtable I reference.
Obama, Epstein insists, is no intellectual at all. Having trafficked in such circles he has mastered the art of affecting as such. It serves him well … but only momentarily. A pleasant enough guy, a student favorite when an adjunct prof, but scratch below the surface and you get shallow and pedestrian.
This was self-evident in his year 1 foreign policy ‘achievements’ – his speech in Cario, his reset apology tour – his Copenhagen acceptance of his Nobel (for showing up)…all the worlds leaders were thrilled to meet this facinating and intelligent antidote to the cowboy Bush.
And now?
Like most Americans trying to survive, they are baffeld, confused, and increasingly alarmed by Obama inablity to show even a scintilla of the ability to lead. On anything other than a campaign speech.
Yet still the likes of Caro and Brands are in rapture. It’s not really difficult to understand why. HE IS ONE OF THEIRS. Not only did he teach as they did, he came to Washington determined to ressurect the Great Society – & the only ‘growth’ industry in his reign has been in the regulation ‘business’.
Cui Bono? Who benefits? His greatest benefactor hasn’t really been Unions, as much as he has tried, it’s been Academia – The Czars – the billions thrown at reasearch universities – be it in the name of stimulus or green energy or you name it. Besides a blip in the Dakota’s due to the energy boom there – ONLY WASHINGTON DC has positive ‘job growth’!
It is exhibit A why progressives will never get honest or critical about this idiots agenda and it’s cost.
To conclude with my BEGGAR reference; it isn’t Obama who ‘lost his swing’ – he never had one. It’s Friedman who is playing a poor imitation of Matt Damon, an angry drunk trying to find one moment of redemption during a golfing match in a very depressing southern town suffering through the Great Depression….
sounds about right for a pompus columnist at the Grey Lady in Bloombergs NYC…
And despite what Friedman and his ilk may try and sell…the rest of the country has woke up.
Wonderful comment. You should be a columist. One minor correction if I may. Obama was not the Editor-in-Chief of the HLR. He was the President. It was purely a popularity contest. In law reviews I am familiar with, the Editor-in-Chief is chosen based upon excellence in legal scholarship. In addition the first article in the law review after the Editor takes over is written by the new editor. Obama never published any law review article even as an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago.
The Woods comparison is great, but rather unflattering. First, is the point that no matter how hard you try, eventually the “real you” comes out. It might come out sooner, it might come out later, but the American people finally get to know the real you in celebrities … and presidents.
The REAL Tiger Woods was a guy who had sex with reportedly, 72 women. Including the teenaged next door neighbor, if you believe the tabloids. Many of them porn stars or local waitresses. Woods has also been accused of using steroids. His high-risk behavior is certainly consistent with long-term steroid use, and his sudden struggles would be consistent with coming off roids. As would be his recurring knee injuries (steroids are highly correlated with joint/ligament injuries because they weaken connective tissue if taken long term).
Now, which President is rumored to have various chemical dependencies? Engages in high-risk behavior? Has hidden the “real you” which is now coming out?
RockThisTown: Don’t forget Alex Smith. My 49ers had the #1 pick overall, needed a QB badly, and chose Utah’s Smith instead of Northern California native Aaron Rodgers from Cal. Having been passed over for the top pick, Rodgers waited uncomfortably in the glare of the cameras as team after team after team picked somebody else, and finally, as the first round was winding down, he was chosen 24th overall by the Green Bay Packers.
KPIX-TV’s Dennis O’Donnell asked Rodgers afterward if he was sorry that the Niners didn’t draft him. His response: “Not as sorry as they’re going to be.” He was right.
Oh yeah, you’re right LN, I forgot about Alex Smith, another NFL bust. I think had him one year on my fantasy team, and if I remember correctly, the only time I started him was when my other QB had a bye week.
Passing over Rodgers for Smith is akin to Decca records passing on the Beatles (“no future in show business”) 50 years ago. Millions (are they up to billions yet?) of records sold later, Decca is finally signing McCartney . . . . . for a ballet. Makes one wonder . . . did these guys lose sleep over the harebrained decisions they made?
A solid B+
I AM TIGER WOODS!
Friedman and fellow fools looking at Obama and seeing “smart, decent and tough” is like Percival Lowell looking at Mars and seeing canals. In both cases, the imagination of the viewer is the source of the vision; the reality about the objects they believe they are observing is that they’re barren and empty with a lot of howling winds blowing around inside.
Tom Friedman is a loser in every respect. No wonder he’s a big star at the New York Times! This newspaper will soon be in the dust bin of history. “All the lies that are fit to print” should be its slogan
Ed, the analogy is actually succinctly correct. Woods was a serial philanderer; Obama is a serial idiot.
He’s not quite an idiot, after all, he can ‘read’ from a teleprompter. He may not know how to pronounce the words right, but, at least he isn’t completely illiterate. lol
People with an IQ as low as 35 can be taught to read and write, more or less.
To put it mildly, Obama doesn’t have to be any rocket scientist to be able to read, haltingly, some dumbed-down sentences from a Teleprompter. This dude can’t even call his DOG without looking at a Teleprompter.
We, the people of the United States, have a president, Barack Hussein Obama, who simply does not have, and never will have, the mental candlepower to function normally in the real world without 24×7 care on the part of various “handlers.” We are not supposed to come out and say that he is mentally deficient, but in his case, it applies.
And why does he have that big scar on the back of his head? (I mean the POTUS, not the canine.)
Just askin’.
0bama’s golf game is a joke much like his presidency.
That being said, I hope he sticks to a lot more golf and a lot less ‘present’ making policy signing.
Dear Liar is not smart (release his transcripts) he is not decent (petulant is more like it), and is not tough (we can only be thankful for his wimpiness.)
And fascism is not the right direction for this country.