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.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, Joseph Epstein had a great idea.

Ignore Trump’s tweets!

The country, he said, would be better for it.

He reported that his son had nicely formulated “the Donald Trump problem for thoughtful conservatives.”

“I approve of almost everything he has done,” the son remarked, “and I disapprove of almost everything he has said.”

I second that notion. On the positive side, the Trump Administration gets credit from me for nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, for moving of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, for removing often-strangling regulations from business, for opening the Keystone pipeline, and for helping to pass tax-reform law.

On the negative side, consider the tweets — the bragging tweets, the touchiness, the crude put-downs of anyone who disagrees with him (“Little Marco, ” “insecure Oprah, ” “Sloppy Steve, ” and the rest), the unrestrained vulgarity.

Epstein goes on: “America has had ignorant, corrupt, vain, lazy presidents before, but in Donald Trump we have the first president who is a genuine boor.

“In many realms of life, a boor’s rude, unmannerly nature can be forgivable. A wise stockbroker, who makes his clients lots of money, might get away with being a boor. A boorish winning football coach— Mike Ditka, take a bow—is livable if not likable. Showbiz has never been without its boors, from George Jessel to Whoopi Goldberg. Even a boorish friend is possible, if he is also loyal, generous and honorable. But a boorish president of the United States presents a problem.

“The presidency, like the monarchy in England, has a symbolic along with a practical aspect. The president is meant to represent the nation at its best. What precisely that means can vary greatly in a country as wide and differentiated as ours. Dwight David Eisenhower was a different model of our best than was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harry S. Truman was different again, and yet in his own way he represented the country, in its Middle Western, small-business, common-sensical strain.”

Think back to President Barack Obama.   It was possible to oppose much of what he did — a bad nuclear deal with Iran, a hopelessly cumbersome health-care law, deserting Israel at the United Nations, and various actions to exacerbate, not alleviate race relations (though on that score, he gets a pass from me because he had to contend, himself, with being the first Black president in U.S. history, which subjected him to racism).

Yet, there was almost no hint of corruption, no sexual scandal of any sort for Obama, who came across as a loving husband and a good father.

“What is to be done?” Epstein wonders.

“ I wonder if we might start with journalism. What if American reporters began by ignoring Trump’s tweets, treating them as no more than the belches and embarrassing flatulence of an incurably dyspeptic man? Heavy media coverage of his tweets only encourages the old boy.

“As things stand, with television commentators awaiting each morning’s fresh batch of presidential tweets, and with journalists sniffing out possible sex scandals like so many truffle dogs, the coverage of our politics seems rarely to rise above the intellectual level of the New York Post’s gossip-filled Page Six. Gossip is amusing in its place, but when that place is the White House it tends to lose its allure. In fact, it makes politics in the United States dreary beyond reckoning.”

So, with Epstein’s writing in view, what about this combination: A number of the Trump accomplishments (mainly those listed above), with the style of Obama?