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The most interesting fact I heard in last Thursday’s presidential debate was Joe Biden saying that when he was vice-president he got his golf handicap down to six. At last, the purpose of the vice-presidency revealed! Better golf scores.
Some presidents also play regularly. Barack Obama played 333 times in eight years. Dwight Eisenhower got in an estimated 800 rounds in his two terms. Until it was severely damaged by an ice storm in 2014 there was even an Eisenhower Tree on the 17th hole at Augusta National, where they play the Master’s and where Eisenhower was a member. The president hit it so many times he requested at a club meeting in 1956 that it be removed. It wasn’t. Presidential power had real limits then.
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After first saying his handicap was six, Biden more or less immediately changed it to eight — to avoid subsequent fact-checking, I guess. As usual, Trump avoided precise numbers. He didn’t mention that Kim Jung-Il, father of his good friend Kim Jung-un, had five holes-in-one the first round he played.
Your golf handicap tells you how many strokes above par you’ll score if you play to your potential, based on the eight best scores in your last 20 rounds, adjusted for the difficulty of the courses and then multiplied by a couple of other things. If you can understand the formula for calculating golf handicaps, you can certainly be trusted with the nuclear codes — you could probably write the nuclear codes. The federal debt would be child’s play.
Golf came up in the debate after CNN’s Dana Bash artfully asked Trump what he would say to “voters who have concerns about your capabilities to serve” because he’d be 82 at the end of his second term — a question she clearly intended for Biden, who would have to answer it in the follow-up. Trump mentioned he had recently won two club championships, “not even senior, two regular club championships. To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way.” Biden, by contrast, “can’t hit a ball 50 yards.”
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Well, there you go! If that’s the new test for being president, several dozen players on the PGA Champions Tour (for those 50 and over) are very smart on the course and can hit the ball a lot farther than Trump. I wonder if Franklin Roosevelt, no slouch as president, could hit a golf ball 50 yards.
In the interest of historical thoroughness, I searched the text of the Lincoln-Douglas debates but found no mention of the two men’s golf handicaps, nor of golf at all, for that matter. Lincoln v. Douglas are America’s most famous political debates, though they were for the 1858 Illinois Senate race, which incumbent Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas won, two years before the two faced off again as presidential candidates, this time with Lincoln winning.
They debated seven times in 1858. The format was 60 minutes from the first speaker, 90 minutes of rebuttal from the opponent and then a 30-minute rejoinder. Speakers and listeners, both, were made of sterner stuff in those days. By contrast, six times in Thursday’s debate the moderators told Trump or Biden he had many seconds left out of his two-minute initial response or one-minute rebuttal in case he wished to elaborate. Granted, the subject wasn’t slavery or a looming civil war, but you’d think two men who have each been president, one of whom actually is president, could easily go on for a full two minutes about Social Security or U.S. foreign policy or economic conditions. Evidently not.
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Trump ended the exchange about golf with perhaps the wisest thing said Thursday night: “Let’s not act like children.” To which Biden replied, declining the invitation, “You are a child.”
In my experience of golf, which I play more avidly than ably, people are invariably gracious. It’s the very best players, in fact, who are most tolerant and generous with us duffers. True, in a regular foursome of males of a certain age there is banter and needling. But on Thursday night these two candidates for leader of the free world weren’t joshing each other. Oblivious to context, they were seriously arguing about who was the better golfer.
Politicians are different from the rest of us, F. Scott Fitzgerald might have said. Men and women who live in Theodore Roosevelt’s famous arena clearly get a little over-competitive. It’s hard to believe someone who participates in a spitting contest about his golf handicap before tens of millions of people will happily step aside and let someone else replace him as candidate.
On the other hand, as anyone who plays golf understands from the very first day, its great lesson is humility. And its first rule is: do not compound error. If you make a mistake, take your medicine. If you hit the ball in the woods, pitch it back on the fairway. Don’t try for a hero shot through the trees.
It was obvious from the first minutes Thursday’s debate that the Democrats have made a tragic mistake nominating someone who has declined as much as Joe Biden has. It’s true that high-pressure, 90-minute debates are not really part of the presidential job description. But speaking coherently over the space of a minute unaided by a teleprompter certainly is. And their candidate has trouble doing that.
Golf says don’t double-down on your mistake. Get back in the fairway and see what happens from there.
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