Politics | Maureen Dowd Obama Emerges From White (Frat) House Now Dowd wants to play him at Scrabble By Jason Farago Posted Oct 28, 2009 7:44 AM CDT Copied Melody Barnes, chief domestic policy adviser, and White House trip director Marvin Nicholson leave the White House Sunday, Oct. 25, 2009 to play golf with President Obama. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) 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." Read These Next The Wall Street Journal is naming more names tied to Epstein. The White House and South Park are having a tiff. The sheriff says he's never seen a worse case of child sex abuse. Google exposes man's butt, is ordered to pay him $12.5K. Report an error