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Female Aide Joins Round of Golf :
A first for President Obama
  Melody C. Barnes, a White House
aide, broke through President Obama’s green ceiling Sunday afternoon.
Ms. Barnes, the president’s chief domestic policy adviser, became the
first woman to play a round of golf with Mr. Obama since he tee’d off
his presidency in January.
The milestone is noteworthy as Mr. Obama has come under criticism
recently for hosting a basketball game earlier this month for members of
his cabinet and congress that included no women (“Bunk,” Mr. Obama told
NBC in an interview last week when asked about the controversy over the
estrogen-free game).
Shortly after 1 p.m. on a crisp and sunny fall afternoon, Mr. Obama
and Ms. Barnes took to the links at the U.S Army’s Fort Belvoir in
Virginia. The president wore a black short-sleeve shirt while Ms. Barnes
donned a baseball cap and a dark long-sleeve shirt, according to a White
House pool report prepared by Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times.
 The White House spokesman Bill Burton had e-mailed Ms. Sweet that it
was “not true” that Ms. Barnes had been the first woman to golf with Mr.
Obama since he became president, although the names of no women have
been listed as the president’s companions on his previous 23 rounds
since taking office. (CBS’s Mark Knoller, who keeps meticulous records
of presidential activities — including the aforementioned golf data —
said that the White House does not always release the name of everyone
who golfs with Mr. Obama.)
But after Ms. Sweet asked who had been the first woman to golf with
President Obama, Mr. Burton took a mulligan in a followup e-mail: “I was
wrong about this – all apologies. He golfed with women on the campaign
trail but not until Melody this year. Sorry to all the people who were
unwittingly misled by what I gave the pooler.” It was not immediately
known what Mr. Obama and Ms. Barnes shot on Sunday.
- thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com
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