Obama and Bill Clinton Tee Off
Oh, to be a fly on the golf cart.
President Obama on Saturday broke with his usual practice of golfing with three junior aides and for the first time teed up with former President Bill Clinton
Completing the foursome at the Joint Base Andrews golf course outside Washington on a gray, muggy afternoon was Mr. Obama's chief of staff, William M. Daley, who was commerce secretary in Mr. Clinton's administration, and Doug Band, a longtime aide-de-camp to the former president.
Mr. Obama expanded on his conversations with Mr. Clinton later, when he spoke at a gala dinner for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. He told several thousand diners that he and Mr. Clinton talked about his resolve to let the Bush-era tax cuts expire after 2012 for high incomes — the top tax rates then would return to levels in place during Mr. Clinton's administration — and Mr. Clinton recalled that the economy thrived during his presidency despite Republicans' predictions otherwise.
As the last Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt to be re-elected, Mr. Clinton increasingly is asked in interviews what advice he has for Mr. Obama, whose prospects in 2012 have darkened as the economic recovery has seemed to stall. It is hard to imagine that the subject of politics did not come up in the golf cart.
