“Very seldom do people look at a president golfing with admiring eyes."

Alexander Bolton files an interesting look at Barack Obama's golf addiction after calls that he stop playing until the BP oil leak has been plugged. Bolton also looks at past pressures on Presidents to curtail their golf in the face of criticism.

“Eisenhower was criticized by Democrats who didn’t have a great deal to criticize him for as being asleep at the controls and spending too much time on the golf course,” said historian John Sayle Watterson, author of The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency.

But he has come under criticism from Republicans — and some in the media — for playing the country-club sport while millions of gallons of oil spew into the Gulf of Mexico.

Obama has played at least seven times since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20, according to a compilation of media reports. He has reportedly golfed a total of 39 times since his inauguration, though some rounds came during vacations.

“Very seldom do people look at a president golfing with admiring eyes,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “Like [Sen.] John Kerry [D-Mass.] with windsurfing and Obama with golfing, there’s a feeling that it is an Ivy League, country-club activity.”