AP rolls a gutter ball

The Associated Press reports:

President-elect Barack Obama thought he'd put the bowling jokes behind him.

Not likely.

On the golf course Monday, a woman waiting at the 18th green reminded Obama of his disastrous bowling during the presidential campaign. ...

“That was pretty good, right?” Obama said to cheers as he finished a round of golf near his $9 million rented vacation home near Honolulu.

The woman sitting on a nearby wall shouted, “Better than your bowling.”

...

The woman's quip referred to Obama's embarrassing bowling outing in Pennsylvania, when he knocked down only 37 pins — with the assist during two frames from an 8-year-old. It was an effort to connect with working-class voters, yet he lost Pennsylvania's primary election to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Disastrous”? Really? It was a trip to a bowling alley, not a failed amphibious invasion of Cuba. “Disastrous” seems a bit overheated.

And notwithstanding the AP's certainty that Obama's “disastrous” bowling experience destroyed his ability to “connect with working-class voters,” the man did, um, win the presidency. Seems like he must have connected with at least a handful of working-class voters along the way. Even some Pennsylvanians, who managed to look past Obama's bowling ability and give him a comfortable general-election win.