Obama Emerges From White (Frat) House

Turns out Tom Friedman played golf with President Obama last month—and fellow New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd isn't ashamed to admit she felt "a twinge of envy." Dowd's happy that Obama finally invited a woman to join him on the links this weekend, after catching heat over all-male basketball games and the "frat-house atmosphere" of White House meetings. Caught up in the spectacle of our first black president, "it took quite a while for anyone to accuse Obama of being exclusionary."

Geraldine Ferraro used to complain about Walter Mondale's "smart-ass white boys," and Hillary Clinton lamented the "white boys" in her husband's White House—yet with Obama, the dynamic hasn't changed. "Obama regards himself as the change," Dowd writes, and didn't immediately grasp the importance of changing what was around him. But rather than golf, the columnist would rather take on the president in Scrabble: "I’m curious about what X and Z words the smarty-pants Y chief executive can come up with."