Obama Plays Pool

Some say he was just trying to score points with working class voters. But when Democratic hopeful Barack Obama during a 2008 campaign stop picked up a pool cue in a West Virginia bar and started running balls, he was simply following a long, proud and very presidential tradition.

Consider this: George Washington reportedly won a game of pool in 1748; John Quincy Adams installed a table in the presidential quarters in 1828; and Abraham Lincoln extolled the virtues of pool as a "scientific game lending recreation to the otherwise fatigued mind."

Even Founding Father Thomas Jefferson was said to have a table at Monticello.

But Obama should also be careful about pocketing balls for political gain. After Adams used his own money to purchase a pool table, his political opposition in 1828 took him to task for installing "gambling furniture" in the White House.