PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

As a voter, it is hard for me to believe that Donald Trump is still alive in the current presidential race.

He must take all of us for fools as he continues to illustrate that he does not have the temperament or the intellectual capacity to function in the nation’s highest political office.

I say enough!

Consider what has happened in the last week or so after some Trump supporters said he would get his act together after a woeful debate performance. He simply showed his true colors.

In the middle of the night – actually at about 3 a.m. in the morning – he wrote a tweet indicating, again, his true feelings about women as objects. He said a beauty pageant contestant, Alicia Machado, was too fat and actually had appeared in a sex tape video. Why does he focus on such, thus detracting from the kind of comments that could attract more voters to him?

I say enough!

It’s not just, as some of my friends contend, that media elites are out to get Trump and, thus, don’t treat him fairly. As a former reporter, all you have to do to illustrate Trump’s true colors is to quote him.

I usually don’t agree with E J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist who tends most of the time to veer left. But, this time, he was on the mark in what he wrote over the weekend:

“This (the Trump performance in his early morning tweets) should be a wake-up call to political analysts who have gone out of their way since Trump announced his candidacy to pretend that he was the ingenious creator of a political special sauce who deserved our respect for ‘speaking his mind.’ No, Trump all along has been a clinically self-involved con man who never took the issues, the presidency or the future of our country seriously. Can there be any doubt that his campaign is a branding exercise gone, quite literally, mad?

“The answer is that this episode should finally force everyone to say: Enough. Trump is neither normal nor stable. He is manifestly dangerous to our country and erratic in everything except his unrestrained meanness. He should not be given fifth, sixth and seventh chances. He has shown us who he is. We should believe what we see.”

I say enough!

And, if that means, for me, a vote for Hillary Clinton, so be it.