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.

Marco Rubio, who sometimes comes across, at least to me, as someone full of himself, made a very thought-provoking speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate the other day.

Thought-provoking in the sense that he advocated for a renewed commitment to the idea of a stimulating, fact-filled debate on major public policy issues, but one that still preserved goodwill between competing debaters.

Rubio made his speech soon after Senator Elizabeth Warren was barred from speaking on the Senate floor because of her over-the-top diatribes against Senator Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s nominee for Attorney General.

Columnist Chris Cilliza captured the essence of Rubio’s statements in a piece that ran in New York Times on-line:

“We are becoming a society incapable of having a debate,” he quoted Rubio as saying.

Cilliza went on: “Rubio’s speech was a plea for civility in the Senate, a warning that, if civilized debate dies in the Senate, it will die in the broader society, too. A few lines that really stood out to me (Cilliza):

• “I don’t know of a civilization in the history of the world that’s been able to solve its problems when half the people in a country absolutely hate the other half of the people in that country.”

• “We are becoming a society incapable of having debate anymore.”

• “We are reaching a point in this republic where we are not going to be able to solve the simplest of issues because everyone is putting themselves in a corner where everyone hates everybody.”

• What’s at stake here tonight … is not simply some rule but the ability of the most important nation on earth to debate in a productive and respectful way the pressing issues before it.”

Cilliza adds: “When did ‘reasonable people can disagree’ stop being something we believed in? Why can’t genuine debate not descend into name-calling? Why is confrontation the only way the two parties — and their leading politicians — seem to interact these days?”

The answer, Cilliza writes, “is that confrontation is what energizes the bases of the two parties. And energizing those bases is what politicians spend most of their time focusing on these days. Unfortunately, the byproduct of all that confrontation is an increasing cynicism and disgust among the large swaths of people who aren’t part of either base.”

In this blog, on several occasions, I have advocated a return to middle ground, the area where most pressing public policy problems are solved. In Congress, the middle ground is often lost by the actions of both the presidential administration and Congress itself. For each, winning the debate and demonizing the other side appears to be the goal.

In Oregon, where I operated as a private sector lobbyist for nearly 25 years, to use a quote from Colin Powell, “I bemoan loss of civility in politics.”

If we cannot return to a kind of reasoned and reasonable discourse – the ability to disagree agreeable – I believe all is lost in our form of government.