WHO first referred to Barack Obama as “the Tiger Woods of politics”? The answer is a bit murky, but the phrase was not widely repeated in the public conversation until the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd used it in a March 2007 column wondering whether Obama is tough enough to win the White House. It seems a self-answering question: If Obama were really like Woods, the steely-nerved winner of all of golf’s most coveted championships, then nobody would ask whether he’s tough enough to win. But Dowd said it anyway, and the phrase has caught on; if you search the Nexis database for stories containing “Barack Obama” and “Tiger Woods,” you’ll find 1,232 examples. That makes it official, at least in the world of the punditocracy: Barack Obama is the Tiger Woods of politics.
It sounds good, except that anyone who knows anything about golf—or who knows anything about politics, for that matter—knows it’s simply not true.
Comments