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.

It was about 10 years ago now that I made a decision to become independent politically – it is called “unaffiliated” now – which means that I would be neither a Republican or a Democrat.

At the time, I took this action for at least a couple reasons.

• One was that, as a lobbyist, I felt it was better expressly not to identify with either party because I had “to work the middle,” not just those affiliated with one party or the other, at the Capitol in Salem.  Many policy issues are decided in that space – the middle.

• A second reason, frankly, was that I was tired being identified with either party since “party politics” is not my first love. I also disliked being identified with the excesses of either the Ds or the Rs.

All of this came to my mind this morning when I read a column in the Wall Street Journal by Joseph Epstein, author of “The Ideal of Culture and Other Essays” and the forthcoming “Charm: The Elusive Enchantment” to be published in October.

This was the headline:

Don’t Invite Me to a Party If It’s a Political One

A good friend of mine says he ‘hates’ Paul Ryan. Hates! What motivates such an unseemly passion?

And here is more from Epstein:

“The other day, sorting through my always ample junk mail—pleas for donations to save the armadillo, to conquer dandruff, to fight elegance—I noted an envelope from the Illinois Republican Party. The GOP wanted to know if I intended to register as a Republican in the coming election, and, while we were at it, wanted to know my age, income, whether I owned my residence, and other information that was not any of its business.

“Without a moment’s reflection, I threw this bit of mail, too, into the garbage. Even though I haven’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1976, I have never considered myself, nor ever shall, a locked-in member of a political party. In 2016, I could not bring myself to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and with every passing day I feel better about that abstention.”

With Epstein, I admit that it is difficult, given America’s history, to imagine the country functioning without political parties. But it is equally difficult to imagine, as Epstein put it, “political truth and America’s larger interests lying chiefly with either Republicans or Democrats. To sign on with one or the other is to give away too much in independence of thought, feeling, integrity.”

Epstein writes, “If you have signed on as a Democrat in our day, for example, you have to retain a certain sympathy for, among others, Bernie Sanders, Robert Menendez and Maxine Waters, or at any rate you cannot come out strongly against them.”

Yet, he adds, “if you have signed on as a lifetime Republican, you are stuck with the Freedom Caucus, John Bolton and Ted Cruz. One party lashes you to the moral certainty of Elizabeth Warren, the other to the overconfidence of John Kasich, who, if pressed, will tell you that as governor he wiped out Islamic State in Ohio.”

Point made.

I disliked – read, “hated” – to be identified with either party, given that parties have become haters…one sides hates the other which makes it almost impossible to find the mart middle ground.

Party politics, Epstein continues, “also conditions you in ways that often do not make much sense. A good friend of mine—a lifelong Democrat, though one flexible enough to have been against President Obama’s Iran deal—told me not long ago that he hates Paul Ryan. Hates! I didn’t press him for his reasons. But Mr. Ryan, the best representative both personally and ideationally of intelligent Republicanism, seems, with such a large pool to choose from, a strange man to hate. Only membership in a political party could motivate such unseemly passion.”

I agree, again.

U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan has faced an almost impossible job in the nation’s Capitol – herding cats among Republicans, facing off against Democrats (such as Representative Nancy Pelosi who appears to hate Ryan), and contending with the worst president in U.S. history, Republican Donald Trump.

All of this has made it impossible, unfortunately, for Ryan to show the policy chops that made him a solid figure in the U.S. House, not to mention a candidate for vice president.

To avoid the hate of both sides, Epstein says chose to be an independent.

And, as he concludes: “Easy enough to understand why those thoroughly committed to one or another of our political parties, heavily invested emotionally in them, would look down on someone who declares himself an independent, content to sit away from the struggle far off in the bleachers.

“My own feeling, though, is that the view of the game is better and more amusing from up there, and the air a lot cleaner.”

So, from my own spot above the “hate game” — some no doubt would call them the “cheap seats” or the “peanut gallery” — I agree.