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 consider what is happening politically in this country, the question in the headline resonates.

Neither the Republicans or the Democrats appear to have the wherewithal to govern effectively.

If governing means the ability to solve pressing societal problems, then neither party can do the job.

If governing means the ability to distinguish between issues that require government intervention and those that don’t, then neither party can do the job.

If governing means the ability of those in high elective office to understand how to disagree agreeably with the nation’s overall interest at heart, then neither party can do the job.

Or, consider President Donald Trump, who, in major surprise, won the nation’s top political job a year ago, though he didn’t take office for a few months. His propensity to revert to his twitter account seemingly every night, sends impossible messages.

It also makes it well-nigh impossible for those who work for him to do their jobs – which, come to think of it, may be just what he wants because, remember, he want all the focus to be on him. How can you work for someone who changes his tune with every tweet?

In a piece in the Wall Street Journal, columnist William Galston put it this way:

“President Trump has gradually discovered the meaning of the oath he swore on Jan. 20, and he doesn’t seem to like it. In the course of an interview on ‘The Larry O’Connor Show’ last week, he said, ‘The saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.’

“Meet James Madison’s Constitution, Mr. President. It is nothing like a family business. It is designed to frustrate you.”

Mr. Galston continues:

“The point of the Constitution is not to do the bidding of any one institution, let alone a single individual. It is to preserve liberty by thwarting tyranny, which Madison defined in Federalist 47 as ‘the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands.’

“The preamble to the Constitution provides a terse statement of the purposes it intends to promote. The body of the document lays out in some detail the institutions through which these purposes may be pursued legitimately. They channel power, and in so doing they limit it.

“These forms matter. In our system, public officials must not only do the right thing; they must do it in the right way. Good intentions that run roughshod over institutional limits are abuses of power.”

So, all parties, both the House the Senate in Congress and the President, are unable to do the job of governing, then what?

Another columnist, Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post, got is just right the other day.

“We have reached a moment of intellectual and moral exhaustion for both major political parties. One is dominated by ethnic politics — which a disturbingly strong majority of Republican regulars have found appealing or acceptable. The other is dominated by identity politics — a movement that counts a growing number of Robespierres. Both seem united only in their resentment of the international economic order that America has built and led for 70 years.”

So, what should we wish for? Gerson says “it is a measure of our moment that this (the answer) is not obvious.”

For me, one answer is to form a third party, one that does not practice the Republican art of “ethnic politics” nor practice the Democrat art of “identity politics.”

It would be a party of the middle ground, one that accepts Constitutional norms and looks for what I call the “smart middle.”

Tough to do? Yes.

Possible? Perhaps, given the excesses of the current two party system.