White House Memo: Obama vs. Boehner: Tee-Off Time

Representatives for both men say that they will find plenty of time to talk deficit reductions and spending cuts when they tee off.

Oh, please. This game is not about debt ceiling negotiations. It is a chance for Mr. Boehner, an accomplished golfer, to take on the most powerful man in the world; for the competitive Mr. Obama, who has been working hard to improve his game, to measure himself against his political nemesis.

Mr. Obama is not taking any more chances than necessary. He is bringing along a partner: Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who, at least by the reckoning of Golf Digest, is a better golfer than his boss and Mr. Boehner.

Golf Digest estimates Mr. Obama’s handicap — perhaps generously, in the view of some golfers — at 17, meaning, theoretically, that the president would typically play 18 holes in the high 80s to low 90s. The magazine put Mr. Biden’s handicap at 6.3 and Mr. Boehner’s at 7.9.

Golf has long been considered a window into character, or at least personality. Both President Bushes would speed-golf through 18 holes as if they had to beat the clock, not the course, leaving little time for introspection. President Bill Clinton had a reputation for being somewhat loose with the rules.

Mr. Obama’s golf game is characterized by long, slow rounds, with a lot of time hunting for balls in the woods. The president, say people who have golfed with him, is meticulous, studied and determined to improve his game through practice, practice and more practice. He has lodged more than 70 rounds of golf since taking office, most of them at the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base.

“It’s a way for him to relax, where he can barely see the Secret Service agents who are around him all the time,” one administration official said.

The president is private about a lot of things he does during the day; he is fiercely private about his golf game, and rarely allows reporters anywhere near him when he’s on a course.

People who have played with Mr. Obama say that he is very good at getting out of sand traps. But of course, that might be construed as a very backhanded compliment; the only way you get good at getting out of sand traps is if you get into a lot of sand traps to begin with.

Mr. Boehner is a different story.

“He likes the game,” said Arthur Mason, a vice president of the lobbying firm Cassidy and Associates who has played with Mr. Boehner. “He’s competitive, but in a cordial way.”

Mr. Boehner typically shoots in the low to mid-80s (Mr. Obama is in the low to mid-90s), but recently posted a round of 75, one source familiar with his game said. He swings right-handed, but putts left-handed.

Mr. Boehner has not been sounding like someone who plans to cut the president much slack. “I was watching one of these cable programs — it must have been Saturday morning, when somebody said, ‘Well, you know, if the president wants strokes from Boehner, Boehner ought to say to the president: ‘Mr. President, you can have all the strokes you want. It’ll just cost you a trillion dollars per stroke,’?” Mr. Boehner told a Rotary Club audience last week in Middletown, Ohio. “I thought it was a brilliant idea.”

Mr. Boehner is friends with the golf legend Jack Nicklaus. He has also played with Tiger Woods in a pro-am tournament two years ago at the Congressional Country Club outside Washington.

Scared yet, Mr. President?

Don’t be. You’ve got Biden.

Mr. Biden, 68, did not take up golf until he was 49, recovering from two operations for an aneurism, and his doctor told him that one of the few things he could do for exercise would be to hit golf balls. A friend of his would drive him to a restaurant in Oxford, Pa., that sat on a golf course. It was there that Mr. Biden began developing his game.

Mr. Biden now has such a low handicap — his idea of stress release is to hit buckets of golf balls at a driving range — that he and his aides have been a little worried that it could put him at a disadvantage on Saturday.

So twice this week, Mr. Biden has made nighttime visits to the public course at Hains Point, on the Potomac River in southwest Washington, to practice.

And then, there is the last — and most mysterious — member of Saturday’s foursome: Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, a Republican.

“Kasich is the wild card,” Mr. Mason said. A solid afternoon’s worth of efforts to elicit tidbits about his golf game elicited nothing.

The one thing that is known: Mr. Kasich did build his house, in Delaware County, Ohio, next to a golf course.

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Eyeing the White House After Service in China

Blindsided, Pentagon officials considered whether the best response would be to pack up and leave before the mission had even begun. The American ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., advised forcefully against it. Too much was at stake, he said. Better to make clear Mr. Gates’s displeasure, then move on to more serious business.

Which is what Mr. Gates did, raising the issue with President Hu Jintao and relaying Mr. Hu’s embarrassed response to reporters shortly afterward.

“Jon came in and gave sensible advice,” said a person who was privy to the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the debate had been both private and official. “It was classic and proper handling of a difficult situation with the Chinese.”

It was also classic Huntsman. The ambassador, who was to leave his post on Saturday, has proved deft with the carrot and stick, mixing measured criticism of China’s government with a relentless effort to cement its fractious relations with the United States. It has not always worked: in recent months, as China’s growing crackdown on domestic dissidents drew Mr. Huntsman’s pointed objections, the efforts of the ambassador and other American diplomats have been angrily rejected by Beijing.

When President Obama selected Mr. Huntsman, then the popular Republican governor of Utah, as ambassador in 2009, pundits speculated that the president was working to edge him out of the race for the 2012 Republican nomination. Mr. Huntsman has implied otherwise in speeches, expressing respect for Mr. Obama’s skills and saying that they share a common cause in improving relations.

Now that Mr. Huntsman is publicly pondering a run for the nomination anyway — an unstated but clear reason behind his departure — the question may not be whether his China stint hurt his chances, but whether it improved them. Clearly, he did not achieve the goals he set. In a valedictory speech last month in Shanghai, he put his frustrations with China’s prickly and suspicious diplomacy on full display.

“Turning the relationship on and off in reaction to unwelcome events is inconsistent with the objective of a positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship that our leaders have set out to achieve,” Mr. Huntsman said. “Canceling meetings as a sign of displeasure will not encourage greater respect for each other’s views.”

“We cannot move forward if, when differences emerge, only one of us is fully committed and fully engaged,” he said.

Getting China fully engaged — and persuading it to temper the suspicion and resentment that has marked even warm periods in its relationship with the United States — is the Obama administration’s strategic goal and, by all accounts, Mr. Huntsman’s passion. If that goal is, by many assessments, only slightly less distant than it was two years ago by, his pursuit of it wins wide praise.

“The course of a major relationship such as that between the United States and China is not going to be guided solely by the skill or lack thereof of an ambassador, but what an ambassador can do is make a meaningful difference,” J. Stapleton Roy, a China-born diplomat who served President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and was President Bill Clinton’s first ambassador to China, said. “If Washington has confidence in the ambassador and the ambassador has access, then a lot of business will get done.” Mr. Huntsman, he said, “has what it takes. He’s done a superb job.”

Current and former diplomats and White House officials said he skillfully managed preparations for the two signal occasions of his tenure, the state visits of both nations’ leaders to the other’s capital. Workers at the United States Embassy in Beijing give him high marks for his management of the United States’ second-largest diplomatic outpost.

Officially, the Chinese government bade him a fond farewell. Vice President Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to President Hu, called him “an old friend of China” in a meeting last month, adding, “We will never forget what you have done.”

Polished by years in American politics and fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Huntsman was nothing if not charming in his courtship of the Chinese. He regularly reminded Chinese audiences of his adopted Chinese daughter and his years in Asia as a youth. He flummoxed Chinese security guards — but perhaps left a distinctively American impression on Chinese diplomats — by forgoing the requisite limousine and suit and instead bicycling in casual clothes to several meetings at the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

He nevertheless spent much of his two years in the diplomatic doghouse. Mr. Huntsman did win the rare permission to visit Tibet, but he was denied an official visit to the restive western region of Xinjiang. (He went anyway, as a private citizen.) The cold shoulder included efforts to limit his official dealings to lower-level Chinese diplomats, as is standard for ambassadors who are out of favor. Most of those moves were a consequence of the deep chill that settled over relations in 2010, when the Chinese crimped Google’s Chinese search-engine business and the White House entertained the Dalai Lama and approved the sale of weapons to Taiwan. That was dispelled only after the successful visit to Washington by Mr. Hu last winter.

Perhaps Mr. Huntsman’s greatest misstep, which he has insisted was just a coincidence, was to wander into the tense scene of a pro-democracy protest in February while on a stroll through central Beijing with his family. The protest, the first of several Internet-based calls for a “Jasmine Revolution,” drew a horde of security agents who regarded Mr. Huntsman as a potential provocateur.

Mr. Huntsman later publicly condemned the beating and detention of foreign journalists at the scene. The Chinese, who appear to believe he deliberately attended the event, placed him back in the doghouse. But last week, at a farewell reception at the United States Embassy, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi shared a toast with Mr. Huntsman and his wife. He appears to leave China in good standing — much as a future president, Mr. Bush, did when he left the chief diplomatic post in 1975.

 

Eyeing the White House After Service in China

Blindsided, Pentagon officials considered whether the best response would be to pack up and leave before the mission had even begun. The American ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., advised forcefully against it. Too much was at stake, he said. Better to make clear Mr. Gates’s displeasure, then move on to more serious business.

Which is what Mr. Gates did, raising the issue with President Hu Jintao and relaying Mr. Hu’s embarrassed response to reporters shortly afterward.

“Jon came in and gave sensible advice,” said a person who was privy to the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the debate had been both private and official. “It was classic and proper handling of a difficult situation with the Chinese.”

It was also classic Huntsman. The ambassador, who was to leave his post on Saturday, has proved deft with the carrot and stick, mixing measured criticism of China’s government with a relentless effort to cement its fractious relations with the United States. It has not always worked: in recent months, as China’s growing crackdown on domestic dissidents drew Mr. Huntsman’s pointed objections, the efforts of the ambassador and other American diplomats have been angrily rejected by Beijing.

When President Obama selected Mr. Huntsman, then the popular Republican governor of Utah, as ambassador in 2009, pundits speculated that the president was working to edge him out of the race for the 2012 Republican nomination. Mr. Huntsman has implied otherwise in speeches, expressing respect for Mr. Obama’s skills and saying that they share a common cause in improving relations.

Now that Mr. Huntsman is publicly pondering a run for the nomination anyway — an unstated but clear reason behind his departure — the question may not be whether his China stint hurt his chances, but whether it improved them. Clearly, he did not achieve the goals he set. In a valedictory speech last month in Shanghai, he put his frustrations with China’s prickly and suspicious diplomacy on full display.

“Turning the relationship on and off in reaction to unwelcome events is inconsistent with the objective of a positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship that our leaders have set out to achieve,” Mr. Huntsman said. “Canceling meetings as a sign of displeasure will not encourage greater respect for each other’s views.”

“We cannot move forward if, when differences emerge, only one of us is fully committed and fully engaged,” he said.

Getting China fully engaged — and persuading it to temper the suspicion and resentment that has marked even warm periods in its relationship with the United States — is the Obama administration’s strategic goal and, by all accounts, Mr. Huntsman’s passion. If that goal is, by many assessments, only slightly less distant than it was two years ago by, his pursuit of it wins wide praise.

“The course of a major relationship such as that between the United States and China is not going to be guided solely by the skill or lack thereof of an ambassador, but what an ambassador can do is make a meaningful difference,” J. Stapleton Roy, a China-born diplomat who served President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and was President Bill Clinton’s first ambassador to China, said. “If Washington has confidence in the ambassador and the ambassador has access, then a lot of business will get done.” Mr. Huntsman, he said, “has what it takes. He’s done a superb job.”

Current and former diplomats and White House officials said he skillfully managed preparations for the two signal occasions of his tenure, the state visits of both nations’ leaders to the other’s capital. Workers at the United States Embassy in Beijing give him high marks for his management of the United States’ second-largest diplomatic outpost.

Officially, the Chinese government bade him a fond farewell. Vice President Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to President Hu, called him “an old friend of China” in a meeting last month, adding, “We will never forget what you have done.”

Polished by years in American politics and fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Huntsman was nothing if not charming in his courtship of the Chinese. He regularly reminded Chinese audiences of his adopted Chinese daughter and his years in Asia as a youth. He flummoxed Chinese security guards — but perhaps left a distinctively American impression on Chinese diplomats — by forgoing the requisite limousine and suit and instead bicycling in casual clothes to several meetings at the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

He nevertheless spent much of his two years in the diplomatic doghouse. Mr. Huntsman did win the rare permission to visit Tibet, but he was denied an official visit to the restive western region of Xinjiang. (He went anyway, as a private citizen.) The cold shoulder included efforts to limit his official dealings to lower-level Chinese diplomats, as is standard for ambassadors who are out of favor. Most of those moves were a consequence of the deep chill that settled over relations in 2010, when the Chinese crimped Google’s Chinese search-engine business and the White House entertained the Dalai Lama and approved the sale of weapons to Taiwan. That was dispelled only after the successful visit to Washington by Mr. Hu last winter.

Perhaps Mr. Huntsman’s greatest misstep, which he has insisted was just a coincidence, was to wander into the tense scene of a pro-democracy protest in February while on a stroll through central Beijing with his family. The protest, the first of several Internet-based calls for a “Jasmine Revolution,” drew a horde of security agents who regarded Mr. Huntsman as a potential provocateur.

Mr. Huntsman later publicly condemned the beating and detention of foreign journalists at the scene. The Chinese, who appear to believe he deliberately attended the event, placed him back in the doghouse. But last week, at a farewell reception at the United States Embassy, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi shared a toast with Mr. Huntsman and his wife. He appears to leave China in good standing — much as a future president, Mr. Bush, did when he left the chief diplomatic post in 1975.