With presidential season in full swing, with politics in play and rhetoric flying fast and furious, we at Devil Ball have a simple question for each of our two candidates:

You guys golf?

Come on, it's a serious issue! Almost all our presidents have golfed! And you can tell a lot about a president by the way he golfs, according to the authors of Presidential Lies: The Illustrated History of White House Golf. (And no, let's not go with the predictable "off the tee, Democrats go left and Republicans go right" hackery.) More on that in a moment.

First, let's see how golf has figured into the current campaigns. As best I can tell, John McCain doesn't golf much, which is strange considering he's an old guy from Arizona. I thought it was the law out there. Anyway, his most recent golf saga involves getting chauffeured around in a golf cart driven by George H.W. Bush. It wasn't exactly the right message to send the electorate, according to Newsweek's Eleanor Clift:

This is no time to get photographed in a golf cart—not with gas prices keeping many Americans from vacationing and Barack Obama traveling the world with a media entourage normally reserved for popes and presidents. The video footage of Obama shooting hoops with Marines and sinking a 30-footer provided a sharp contrast to the stooped figure of John McCain riding in a golf cart with the senior President Bush and sharing the indignities of being sidelined. 

Those paid to document the ups and downs of the candidates' images have a vested interest in telling us what we're supposed to be seeing, but I didn't exactly have a problem with the McCain-in-cart image; it wasn't like the cart was being pulled by a team of child laborers. (That happened off-camera.)

Obama, on the other hand, actually got out on the course and played a little golf while on vacation in Hawaii last month. If you click here, you can check out the video of his swing, though you do have to sit through a minute or so of cutesy Hawaii local-news chat. Obama didn't reveal how well he played at the Olomana Golf Course in Waimanalo. Considering his bowling debacle from a few months back, we can probably read a lot into that.

There's a proud lineage of golfing tradition in the White House. William Howard Taft, pictured at right with Spanky of the Little Rascals, was the first president to golf -- and apparently took the John Daly approach to fitness, too. Bill Clinton claimed a handicap of "12 or 13," with only one (or so) mulligan a round. (Hmm.) JFK knew what he was doing on a golf course, and could break 80. The Bushes were pretty much born to play golf, and Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding took their turns on the links, too. Dwight Eisenhower has a tree at Augusta named after him. And Gerald Ford, the poor unlucky son of a gun, had an unfortunate habit of hitting spectators at pro-am tournaments; he did it at least twice.

So, take heart, senators -- you may not golf, or you may not golf well, but at least you're not taking out your constituency one Titleist at a time.