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.

If you read this blog, you know that, from time to time, I open the Department of Pet Peeves. I am the director and have full and absolute authority about how the department runs.

I also am in charge of one other department. It is the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering. Again based on my whim and caprice, I intend to include some of the best quotes I have read from columnists at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times, all of which I read – at least skim – daily. I might include a good quote from the Oregonian if I can find one.

I don’t always agree with the quotes. I just find them to be thought-provoking.

So, here goes – the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering is now open.

Trump and the Media: Many of us have had just about enough of the squabble between the media and President Trump. For the media, they ought to focus on covering the president rather than fighting with him, which, when they do, just means they get deflected from reporting real news.

Here’s the way Daniel Henninger from the Wall Street Journal put it:

“…the press seems more interested in berating the president than in covering him. Mr. Trump’s thin skin and lack of self-discipline don’t help his cause. Nor does his rocky relationship with the truth. But Mr. Trump isn’t the first president to prevaricate; he’s just less polished than we’re accustomed to.”

Henninger gets both sides right. The media are at fault, but so is the president with a “thin skin and lack of self-discipline.

Congress and Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch: This confirmation donnybrook will begin occurring in earnest in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal suggests this approach for Democrats.

“If Democrats have a brain in their head, they’ll let Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch sail through the Senate. He’s too attractive. He has been frank and respectful in his meetings with them. He’s been candid about the man who nominated him, Donald Trump, to the reported irritation of the president. He is a thinker of clear conservative leanings who cannot be painted as radical because he’s radical as warm milk. His decisions tend to be plain, direct yet highly literate; in one he diagramed a sentence. He’s a friendly persuader with a serious intellectual background (Marshall Scholar at Oxford) and personal dignity.

“Sharp and uniform opposition to him would look radical.

“They should make critical or reserved speeches at the confirmation hearings next month and then softly vote yes. They should make a show of their desire to be fair, impartial, Constitution-minded. Then they should try to kill the next nomination as a bridge too far, while hiding behind the good faith they showed in accepting Judge Gorsuch.”

Politics and the Judiciary: Laurence Silberman, senior judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, got it right the other day in the Wall Street Journal when he said two elements of the judiciary had violated solid, independent traditions by becoming far too political.

His reference was to Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg and FBI Director James Comey. Here is the way he wrote it:

“Last year we experienced a rather spirited presidential election season. It was probably the fiercest of my lifetime. But we should not be troubled by heated political campaigns. They are the occasional episodes that mark a healthy democracy.

“In one respect, however, the 2016 election campaign was quite troubling. We saw two of our most important legal institutions—the Supreme Court and the Justice Department—bend in the political winds.

“The thrust of my speech (to the Federalist Society) was that the press swayed judicial decisions. But it never occurred to me that the pressures and inducements would lead to a justice’s open intervention in a political campaign. I refer to my onetime colleague Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To be sure, she isn’t entirely alone. During the campaign, Justice Kennedy publicly lamented its divisive nature, as if he were speaking from Buckingham Palace. Although this is perhaps in bad form for a justice, it pales in comparison to recent statements of ‘The Notorious RBG.’”

Beyond Ginsburg, Comey’s political indiscretions during the Trump-Clinton are far too obvious to cite here, yet he still has his job.

The Permanent Political Campaigns: Also in the Wall Street Journal, Henninger bemoans the failure of campaigning to end and governing to begin. The first does not serve the second. Here is the way he wrote it:

“We could spend the next several years arguing whether Mr. Trump or the dishonest mainstream media started this, but a more productive question is, why is the mayhem happening?

“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.

“The permanent campaign has been with us a long time, and Barack Obama was the first president who didn’t disband his campaign operation after winning. But we’re in a different dimension today.”

Again, Henninger is right. People on both sides in this country ought to get over campaigning and get about the business of governing, which is often a return to what I have called the “smart middle” where most pressing public policy problems are solved anyway.