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.

Telling the truth used to be an important commitment in politics and government administration.

Tell a lie and you could get caught in a web, damaging your candidacy for public office or your record as a government official.

No longer – at least most of the time.

In an era of Trump, truth is a casualty.

Consider these recent quotes on the subject:

• From a column by Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal:  “Mr. Trump unquestionably is a failure when it comes to conforming to current manners or selecting lies that prominent media organizations will endorse, e.g., you can keep your health care.  Then again all presidential speech is instrumental—a means to an end, with truth merely a tactical consideration.”
• From a commencement speech by ousted U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to the Virginia Military Academy: “If our leaders seek to conceal the truth or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.

“This is the life of nondemocratic societies, comprised of people who are not free to seek the truth. … A responsibility of every American citizen to each other is to preserve and protect our freedom by recognizing what the truth is and is not, what a fact is and is not, and begin by holding ourselves accountable to truthfulness, and demand our pursuit of America’s future be fact-based, not based on wishful thinking; not hopeful outcomes made in shallow promises; but with a clear-eyed view of the facts as they are and guided by the truth that will set us free to seek solutions to our most daunting challenges.

“As I reflect upon the state of American democracy, I observe a growing crisis of ethics and integrity. When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth, even on what may seem the most trivial of matters, we go wobbly on America. If we do not as Americans confront the crisis of ethics and integrity in our society, and among our leaders in both the public and private sector, and regrettably at times even the nonprofit sector, then American democracy as we know it is entering its twilight years.”

I reflected this week on this sad state of affairs in American political life. I went back to my own years in government in the mid-1970s through 1990, plus my 25 years as a state government lobbyist.

In those days, without trying to come across as holier-than-thou, truth was a clear goal.

If you sacrificed it, you sacrificed your credibility.

In just one example, back in the late 1980s, when I served as deputy director of the Oregon Economic Development Department, we produced a quarterly report on job growth in the state, including jobs we had helped the private sector create.

I remember toiling over the report in an effort to make sure it was accurate – it bore truth – and would stand up utter inevitable scrutiny.

As a lobbyist, it also was true – and is true today – that it is at least unethical if not illegal to provide inaccurate information to legislators. For one thing, doing so violates the code of conduct of the professional association of lobbyists. For another, if avoiding truth can be proven, it is illegal.

I wish political and government leaders today would hold truth as an important commodity and not, as Mr. Jenkins writes above, “with truth merely a tactical consideration.”

Or, with Mr. Tillerson, I hope we don’t continue relinquishing our freedom without regard to facts and truth.

It’s time for TRUTH IN GOVERNMENT.

To buttress that argument, I even surprise myself by citing something Hillary Clinton said over the weekend – and, for me, Clinton is no normal purveyor of truth. But here is what she said.

In a speech at Yale University, she referenced two books by Yale history professor Timothy Snyder: “On Tyranny” and “The Road to Unfreedom when she said: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

“Professor Snyder … is sounding the alarm as loudly as he can. Because attempting to erase the line between fact and fiction, truth and reality is a core feature of authoritarianism! The goal is to make us question logic and reason and to sow mistrust toward the people we need to rely on: Our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, even ourselves.”