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.

I have written about campaigning versus government before, mostly in relation to the problem of the continual campaign getting in the way of the real work of political governance, the art of compromise.

But, based on a piece by Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger, an additional perspective came home to me.

It is this: The campaigning style does not lend itself to the governing style.

It is more than just avoiding compromise. It is being always about the business of rallying troops, currying favor with them and getting on the nerves of opponents who lost the most recent election, but will be back for more in two or four years.

Here is way Henninger put it.

“Donald Trump is right that the media is making a mountain out of every Trump molehill. Despite the ‘resistance,’ it also remains true that most Americans want the Trump presidency to succeed.

“These Trump Hopefuls, whose number includes people who didn’t vote for him, want the presidency to succeed because they understand that, if it fails, the social and economic condition of their country will be in a bad place.

“Despite this reservoir of goodwill for the Trump presidency, the degree of anxiety about it is palpable. You have to be living in Net-flixed isolation not to have had conversations with people wondering what the hell is going on at this White House.

“Beyond the Beltway bubble, I think most people look upon the pitched battle between Mr. Trump and the news media as they would a playground fight between sixth-graders.

“He hit me first.

“You hit first.

“You’re a liar.

“No, you’re the liar.”

“It is happening mainly because the presidential campaign didn’t end last November. The political culture of the 2017 campaign endures inside the White House and among the press and the Trump opposition.

“Presidential campaigns are an essential feature of the American political system—long, raucous, fiercely contested. But that glorious tumult is supposed to give way to the more substantial, harder politics of the presidency.

“But Mr. Trump himself can revert in an instant to campaign mode—Hillary’s failures, voter fraud and past media transgressions. Or a Florida presidential rally that looks just like a Florida campaign rally…But are the tactics of a campaign transferrable to the daily life of a presidency?

“Some will say the political world underestimated Donald Trump from day one. That’s true—but as a candidate. The presidency, by contrast, is one part of a large and complicated political system, complicated because the Founders wanted the process to be difficult and to require getting buy-in from unavoidably divided factions.”

“The Trump margin for delivering victory to these hopeful Americans is narrower than it should be. The president’s goals could falter or fail if enough Republicans running for election in 2020 decide their own needs require putting distance between themselves and the permanent volcano of the Trump White House. There will be no moral victories for a presidency that cannot produce 50 votes in the Senate.”

Kudos to Henninger.

He is exactly on target when he says campaigning does not produce governing. They are very different. They should be. The major question before all of us in America is whether Trump can stop campaigning and start governing.

If he cannot, we’re all in trouble. If he can, we’ll all be better for it.