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.

The far left is no good.

The far right is no good.

It appears there never is, as I call it, “a smart middle.”

And, if you had the bad fortune to watch the “circus” in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee – the “circus” over sexual allegations against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh – you would realize how bad the extremes are in this country.

The left and right, even if not “far” on either side, hate each other.

In a Washington Post piece the other day, the writer said this: “Even before President Trump’s election, hatred had begun to emerge on the American left—counter-intuitively, as an assertion of guilelessness and moral superiority.

“For many on the left, a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle. ‘America was never that great,’ New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently said. For radical groups like Black Lives Matter, hatred of America is a theme of identity, a display of racial pride.”

Hare are a few additional points from the Washington Post piece.

• “For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes. Certain leaders of the left—Representative Maxine Waters comes to mind—are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to think of hatred as power itself.”
• “The genius of the left in the ’60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it. Thus, the labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the left. This is how the left put itself in charge of America’s moral legitimacy. The left, not the right—not conservatism—would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.”
• “This bestowed enormous political and cultural power on the American left, and led to the greatest array of government-sponsored social programs in history—at an expense, by some estimates, of more than $22 trillion. But for the left to wield this power, there had to be a great menace to fight against—a menace that kept America uncertain of its legitimacy, afraid for its good name.”
• “It is undeniable that America has achieved since the ’60s one of the greatest moral evolutions ever. That is a profound problem for the left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial oppression. The left’s unspoken terror is that racism is no longer menacing enough to support its own power. The great crisis for the left today—the source of its angst and hatefulness—is its own encroaching obsolescence. Today the left looks to be slowly dying from lack of racial menace.”
• “Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous into the menacing. So it has become a weapon of choice. The left has used hate to transform President Trump into a symbol of the new racism, not a flawed president, but a systemic evil. And he must be opposed as one opposes racism, with a scorched-earth absolutism.

In one case in this country, that of Martin Luther King Jr., hatred was not necessary as a means to power. The actual details of oppression were enough. Power came to him because he rejected hate as a method of resisting menace.

So, what about the far right? It is no better than the left. It gets its power from opposing those on the left no matter the subject. That’s what put Trump in the Oval Office in the first place – a radical view of President Barack Obama and his standard commitment to more government.

Trump, of course, practices the language of hate to advance his own cause over that of the country in general.

Back to Obama. It appeared to this president and his supporters that, if there was a perceived problem, then there should be a government solution for it, thus the Washington Post writer’s estimate of some $22 trillion in government spending during the Obama years.

Obama clearly was a skilled orator, not to mention his solid grasp of the English language, which easily dwarfs Trump’s. Though Obama’s approach could sometimes become preachy, he made a solid oral case for his perspective that government could provide answers to all of the problems.

Among other things, his rested his second term on enacting what was called the Affordable Care Act, which, of course, was not affordable at all.

Political advertising at the moment does not add much of substance to the debate, especially over health care. Democrats say they have all the ideas and that Republicans only want to harm those with pre-existing conditions. Neither side is right.

With PolyAnna at my side, I wish for a return to the idea of policy debates that produce solutions somewhere in the middle, which is where the best solutions lie anyway. Not right. Not left. The middle.

Just know that I won’t be holding my breath, especially after watching the last month back and forth in Congress.