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 read this blog – and I know at least one person who does — you may suspect that one of my favorite words is civility.

I ascribe this to the use of the word in one of my favorite political quotes of all time, one uttered by General Colin Powell who decided a number of years ago not run for president as he “bemoaned the loss of civility in politics.”

As I have written previously, I wish I would have been smart enough to say those words – in general and not in relation to any run for political office, which never interested me, nor would I have any chance to be elected.

Powell’s words were true 10 years ago and are even more true today.

The dictionary definition of civility is as follows:

Courtesy; politeness; polite action or expression.

Think about the nature of our country’s politics these days. Civility is not a word that would come to mind.

Democrats berate Republicans as being out of touch and supporters of various forms of depravity.

Republicans berate Democrats as the party of big government that wants to take away personal freedoms.

Each lacks civility toward the other and never the twain shall meet.

To see this in detail, look no farther than political advertising as we head toward a monumental November election that will decide which party controls the House and Senate in Congress.

If you see or hear the ads, you are not encouraged that anyone will ever find a way to reach agreement on the campaign trail. You will not hear or see civility in the ads and that is likely to set the stage for the same lack of civility once winners take office.

That brings me to another pet peeve of mine – the reality of a permanent campaign in this country.

Two authors – Christopher H. Browne, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dennis Thompson, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy at Harvard University – have suggested that “political compromise is difficult in American democracy even though no one doubts it is necessary because of the incursion of campaigning into governing in American democracy.”

They call this the “permanent campaign” which encourages political attitudes and arguments that make compromise more difficult.

They continue: “ These constitute what we call the uncompromising mindset, characterized by politicians’ standing on principle and mistrusting opponents. This mindset is conducive to campaigning, but not to governing, because it stands in the way of necessary change and thereby biases the democratic process in favor of the status quo. The uncompromising mindset can be kept in check by an opposite cluster of attitudes and arguments — the compromising mindset that inclines politicians to adapt their principles and respect their opponents. This mindset is more appropriate for governing, because it enables politicians more readily to recognize and act on opportunities for desirable compromise.”

One of my partners sent me a note last weekend suggesting that, when it comes to health care, Democrats have all the answers and cannot persuade Republicans to come to the negotiating table because all Republicans do is oppose the Ds.

Well, I add that the negotiating table rarely works when both sides are yelling at each other. Smart Republicans – yes, there are some – have ideas about health care, short of a government-run single payer system, the first step toward which was the “Affordable Care Act,” sometimes known as ObamaCare.

So, I say a pox on the extremes in both parties.

I would favor a third party, which, of course, would have no chance to prevail. But a third party based on the idea of getting things done in Washington, D.C. – call it “compromise” or the “smart middle” – sounds better every time I think about.

Let civility prevail!

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.

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.

Every time I see a new editorial endorsement for a major political candidate, I wonder if such endorsements matter.

I suppose the answer is yes and no. Or, perhaps the effect is in the eye of the beholder.

I know my wife sometimes pays attention to endorsements on the theory – at least true in part — that those who write the endorsements have more time to study the issues or personalities involved and, thus, what they advocate is important.

On the other hand, endorsements may either be predictable on the basis of the political slant of the endorser.

I also know many people who ignore endorsements unless they coincide with their own pre-conceived views.

All of this came back to me this week as I noted that the Oregonian newspaper went against predictability when it endorsed Republican Knute Buehler for governor in his race against the incumbent, Democrat Kate Brown. The Oregonian often sides with Democrats in high-profile contests.

That also wasn’t the case a few years ago when the Oregonian surprised many readers by endorsing the Republican in the governor’s race, Ron Saxton. That irritated Democrats who protested the Oregonian’s decision. In the end, the endorsement didn’t matter. Democrat John Kitzhaber won.

As a person who has been involved in many election races in the past, I think editorial endorsements have at least two results.

First, if you get the endorsement, you are happy because you wanted it. So, you turn around and use the favorable language in political advertising, thus suggesting that a third-party thinks you are credible and should win.

Second, if you do not get the endorsement, you also use that to your advantage. You use the slight to energize your advocates to be even more heavily invested in your campaign. In other words, prod those who support you to be mad about the endorsement so they work harder on your behalf.

So, if you are running for election, do you want editorial endorsements? Yes. But getting them is no guarantee of success.

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.

Letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal are often a great place to find nuggets about public policy in this country.

The latest one appeared under the headline, “Democrats Shocked at What Comes Around,” with this subhead:

“The Democrats will create a policy that gives them some short-term advantage, and then appear truly shocked when the Republicans apply the same policy.”

The author, Donald W. Large from Green Valley, Arizona, was commenting on a recent political column in the Journal that criticized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for failing to hold a vote on Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. The author of the column called McConnell’s action “an unprincipled exercise of raw power” and further that it was “an act for which history won’t judge him (McConnell) kindly.”

I confess that I have had the same thought.

But Mr. Large sets the record straight:

“In 1992, Joe Biden, then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced that, if a Supreme Court vacancy occurred in an election year with a Republican president and a Democratic Senate, there would be no vote until after the election. Senator Chuck Schumer reiterated the same policy in 2007, and Senator Harry Reid, then majority leader, added the point that the Senate wasn’t obligated to vote on anyone.

“So,” the letter to the editor writer says, “all Senator McConnell did was to apply to the Democrats the same policy that the Democrats had applied to the Republicans for the previous 25 years. I am often amazed how the Democrats will create a policy that gives them some short-term advantage, and then appear truly shocked and upset when the Republicans turn around and apply the same policy.”

Point made.

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.

Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston performed a huge public service this morning by outlining a list of tactics President Donald Trump always uses to achieve his goals – tactics that indicate that the end matters more than the means.

The list is very instructive. And, while Galston puts his tongue in cheek to suggest that all of us should employ the Trump tactics, if we did, it would make for a far harsher country.

Under the headline, “Trump’s Grim Handbook for Governance,” Galston describes Trump’s personal code in this way:

“With the possible exception of family, all relationships are at bottom transactional. Every man has a price, and so does every woman.

“There’s money, and then everything else. Money and morals are unrelated. Even if a Saudi leader ordered the assassination and dismemberment of a prominent dissident, this is no reason to halt arms sales to the monarchy. If American firms don’t get the contracts, someone else will. Why should we be chumps? If promoting democracy or simple decency costs money, what’s the point?

“The core of human existence is competition, not cooperation. The world is zero-sum: If I win, someone else must lose. I can either bend another to my will or yield to his.

“The division between friends and enemies is fundamental. We should do as much good as we can to our friends, and as much harm to our enemies.

Galston then outlines what he calls Trump’s five operating goals:

Rule 1: The end always justifies the means. Regardless of the path of destruction Trump leaves, he is always right if, in the end, he wins.

Rule 2: No matter the truth of accusations against you, deny everything.

Rule 3: Responding to criticism on its merits is pointless. Instead, challenge the motives and character of your critics. Their criticism isn’t sincere anyway: It’s all politics, the unending quest for dominance. If ridicule works, use it, even if it means caricaturing your adversaries by reducing them to their weakest trait….such as calling Jeb Bush “low energy.”

Rule 4: To win, you must arouse your supporters, and deepening divisions is the surest way to do it. Even if compromise could solve important problems, reject it whenever it threatens to reduce the fervor of your base. No gain in the public good is important enough to justify the loss of power.

Rule 5: It is wonderful to be loved, but if you must choose, it is better to be feared than loved. The desire for love puts you at the mercy of those who can withhold it; creating fear puts you on offense. You cannot control love, but you can control fear.

Galston goes on to write, “Politics is not like figure skating. You get no points for style. You either get your way or you don’t. Nothing else matters.

Critics of Mr. Trump’s code – I am one of them, as is Galston – hodl that the distinction between anything-is-acceptable ends and rationale means is critical. Rationale means is what ought to separate this country from thugs.

I continue to contend that decency and honesty matter – in politics and in life. Trump could care less.

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 think about it, the threesome in the headline represent different skills.

Bobbing: You can shift and feint – call it bobbing – to avoid problems.

Weaving: You can wander this way and that – call it weaving – to avoid problems.

Dodging: You can get out of the way – call it dodging — by moving out of the line of fire just as it closes in on you.

I learned all of these skills during my 25 years as a private sector lobbyist in Oregon, not to mention 15 previous years as a state government employee. Bobbing, weaving and dodging helped me avoid problems as I lobbied for a long list of clients. Sounds simplistic, but, if you think about for awhile, all are useful skills.

Not to compare myself to “our” president, Donald Trump, but he got “credit” in a Washington Post story the other day for at least two of the skills – bobbing and weaving.

Here’s the way the Post wrote it:

“The 26-minute interview that aired October14 was typical Trump — bobbing and weaving through a litany of false claims, misleading assertions and exaggerated facts. Trump again demonstrated what The Fact Checker has long documented: His rhetoric is fundamentally based on making statements that are not true, and he will be as deceptive as his audience will allow.”

Sounds right to me.

Trump appears to engage intentionally in falsehoods, believing that, as they mount up, readers or listeners will lose track of what’s real and what’s not. Then he’ll benefit by escaping responsibility, which is one of his greatest skills.

Though we have had nearly two years of Trump, it’s still hard for me to believe that “the leader of the free world” has no commitment to truth-telling. In a role that conjures up images of a carnival-barker, he appeals to the audience – at least his perceived audience — not to truth and justice.

So it goes. Bobbing, weaving and dodging.

Those are my skills – honest and factual ones, in fact. So, Trump, you cannot have them.

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.

My friend, Dick Hughes, former editorial page editor of the Salem Statesman Journal, now writes a weekly Capitol Chatter column. This week, he included this point in a list of 30 questions he said gubernatorial candidates Kate Brown and Knute Buehler should be expected to answer:

“As governor, your office is in the Oregon State Capitol. Because parts of the Capitol are likely to collapse during The Big One, Senate President Peter Courtney has said it’s irresponsible for the state to let schoolchildren and others visit the Capitol. Do you agree?”

Whatever the answer to the question, it points out a huge lost opportunity for the State of Oregon. It can be easily attributed to two legislative leaders, Senate President Peter Courtney and House Speaker Tina Kotek.

There’s the irony. Two legislative leaders from the same party who could have found an agreement, but failed.

It’s ironic that Courtney now wonders if school children should be allowed in the Capitol Building after he let the renovation project lapse.

Am I biased on this subject? Yes.

My firm, CFM Strategic Communications, represented the company, J.E. Dunn Construction, that won a hard-fought contract to be awarded the Capitol Building Renovation work.

We thought then – and I think now – that the project represented a huge step forward in an effort to upgrade the “Peoples’ Building,” the state capitol, which has stood on the current ground since it was built in 1938. Two versions of the Capitol have burned to the ground since 1938 and the Capitol Building was re-constructed twice. In addition, capitol wings were added in 1977 to provide improved offices for 90 legislators and their staff.

With that history, here a couple summary statements about what happened in 2015 to kill this important project.

• In advance of the 2015 legislative session, legislators created a Capitol Renovation Work Group that met for months to develop a renovation plan. I followed the process for CFM and J.E. Dunn and it was a solid piece of public policy aspiration from the work group, which resulted in a clear recommendation to the Legislature to consider funding the project.
• Improving public safety represented a key part of the project because, if there were to be another earthquake, the Capitol Building would not fare well. In fact, on March 25, 1993, a magnitude 5.6 Scott Mills earthquake damaged the dome, requiring closure for repairs. The rotunda area remained closed for approximately two years for these repairs. This “Spring Break Quake” shook the building enough to shift the statue on top and crack the dome. Additionally, the quake created a three-foot bulge on the west end of the building. Repairs cost $4.3 million and included reinforcing the structure with additional concrete and steel bars. The gold man at the top of the Capitol – it is just the “Gold Man,” with no name, say, for a major state pioneer — was within seconds of falling to the ground with its more than eight ton weight.
• In response to the renovation proposal, the Legislature circulated a request for proposal and our client, J.E. Dunn, asked CFM for public affairs help to improve the tone, character and content of its submission. We were glad to work for months to help J.D. Dunn and, among other things, advocated for an emphasis on the important historical history of Oregon’s Capitol Building – thus the moniker, “The Peoples’ Building.”
• Of course, J.E. Dunn, a privately-held company headquartered in Kansas City with offices in Portland, did the heavy-lifting work to design the complicated construction part of the work – not, obviously, within CFM’s credentials.
• With our help, J.E. Dunn then submitted its proposal to the Legislature and, in a hard-fought process where company officials were interviewed (of course, without CFM in the room), came out as the winner against several other firms, including Oregon construction stalwart, Hoffman Construction. One of the reasons was that J.E. Dunn assigned an experienced manager, Bill Spiller, to lead its team. His previous experience renovating the Kansas Capitol Building gave him a significant “been there and done that” leg up in the completion.

That should have been the end of the process, but then what happened defies explanation, especially from a political point of view.

Democrats, in full control of the legislative process, could not reach agreement on moving forward, so the contract with J.E. Dunn was cancelled. It was reported that one reason revolved around a competing demand from K-12 school interests to devote bond resources to retrofit Oregon classrooms. That was a proposal supported by House Speaker Kotek.

To this day, it escapes me how Democrat leaders – Courtney and Kotek – couldn’t find a compromise that devoted resources to both priorities, the Capitol Building and school buildings.

Insider information from the Capitol suggests that the renovation project could gain new life in the future. If so, good. It deserves to be funded for the good of the entire state. But, given what happened last time around, I won’t hold my breath.

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 I have nothing important to say or to write – standard for me you may say – I often have decided to open the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering, one of three departments I run with a free-hand to do what I want.

If don’t what to say or write, others do, so, the Department is open again this morning.

From William Galston in the Wall Street Journal: “Are the matters that divide Americans today so momentous as to warrant a strategy of unending tit-for-tat escalation into the political equivalent (at least) of civil war?

“In an op-ed in the New York Times, David Marcus, a writer at the Federalist, urges fellow conservatives to end the epidemic of ‘gloating’ that broke out after Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation and adopt instead a ‘muted and conciliatory’ tone. The legitimacy of U.S. institutions and the ability of Americans to talk to one another is at risk, he rightly insists.

“In the same vein, if Democrats regain control of one or both houses of Congress in 2018, they should defend our democratic institutions while showing the American people they are capable of governing on a basis broader than partisanship. If they don’t, our descent into un-governability will continue, and even a victory in 2020 may prove hollow.”

Comment: Well written. To move toward a governable center will require both sides to adopt what Galston calls a “muted and conciliatory” tone. Hard to imagine, but, I submit, worth the effort.

From the Wall Street Journal: “This was a bracing and important moment. Senator Susan Collins (from Maine) was asserting that even by the enormously flexible standards of American political give-and-take, the case against Judge Kavanaugh had gone too far. The current atmosphere, she said, ‘would have alarmed the drafters of our Constitution. Her seriousness and thoroughness on the floor of the Senate notably contrasted with the superficial analysis of so many other senators of both political parties.

“This was in many ways an old-fashioned Senate floor speech espousing ideas about governance that obviously strike many today as old-fashioned. They are not. The senator from Maine deserves gratitude for drawing her colleagues and the rest of us back to the meaning of political responsibility.”

Comment: Senator Collins stood out in her response to the Kavanaugh circus. She did so, not so much by her final vote, but the rationale she provided for it. And, her vote in favor of Kavanaugh probably will earn her a challenge from the left if she decides to run again.

From Allen C. Guelzo a professor of history at Gettysburg College: If Sena story Feinstein was convinced that Ms. Ford’s allegations were serious, she should have shared them with the Judiciary Committee or law enforcement when they first came to her attention weeks earlier. That hesitation — and then the demand for a delay to conduct an FBI investigation — have combined to make Feinstein look uncertain and perhaps unscrupulous.

“Judge Kavanaugh’s critics did not make themselves look better by turning on the FBI itself when it did not find what they wanted, with Senator Richard Blumenthal making the McCarthyesque claim that it ‘smacks of a cover-up.’ Feinstein herself said ‘the most notable part of this report is what’s not in it, suggesting (again) that she has access to some secret knowledge about the case that she won’t share.

“Democrats have also cited Judge Kavanaugh’s angry testimony denying sexual assault as itself disqualifying — as if he had no business crying out while being stretched on the rack. He might not have been as deferential to the senators as norms of judicial gravitas would dictate, but he was certainly more poised than his inquisitors. In the end, even that line of attack accomplished nothing.

“This process has inflicted real damage to Judge Kavanaugh and Ms. Ford—enough to make any intelligent citizen wonder if it would ever be worth entering public service. But the most immediate casualty is likely to be the much-hyped November blue wave. If a vote for a Democratic majority in the Senate is a vote for the tactics of Senator Feinstein, or for the boorish behavior of Senators Blumenthal, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, then that vote may not materialize at all.”

Comment: A trenchant analysis.

More from the Wall Street Journal: “Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the remarks (by Kavanaugh) were ‘so ludicrous and false that they’re not worth even addressing.’”

Comment: Well, Blumenthal ought to know – about falsehoods, that is. The last time he ran for election he said he had been to Vietnam in a bid to illustrate his military credentials. The problem? He never was there.

He was caught in that lie and still won. But the reality of his past dishonesty made him one of the most ironic questioners of Kavanaugh.

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.

There is an old phrase that suggests “it is not a good idea to beat a dead horse.” Don’t know the derivation of that strange phrase, but is could apply to my perspective on health care.

I lobbied health care issues at the Capitol in Salem for all of my 25 years in the private sector business. In Salem, at least part of the time, those involved in health care policy – either the legislators themselves or the lobbyists representing health care interests – found a way to meet in the middle…not the exact middle, of course, but not on either extreme either.

One of the reasons for this, at least when it came to funding health care, dealt with this requirement: Before legislators can leave Salem after a six-month session, they have no choice but to balance the state budget.

On occasion, I and other lobbyists were concerned that health care was the
“balancer” – that is, legislators made other major “general fund” spending decisions first (K-12 education, higher education, corrections, police) before getting around to health care.

I could prove that, but no matter for now. The point was that legislators had to produce a two-year balanced budget, THEN head home.

That, obviously, is not the case in Washington, D.C.

There is nothing that compels a balanced budget on health care or any other subject so Members of Congress and the president rarely ply that ground.  And, beyond the budget, they develop extreme positions, then hold to those positions at all costs while, at the same time, chastising the other side (or sides) as being out of touch and stupid.

Witness the current debate in Congress on health care.

President Donald Trump went on the offensive in an opinion piece published by USA Today last week. Perhaps to no one’s surprise, he used the piece as an opportunity to lambast Democrats rather than to argue for Republican health care policy proposals. Specifically, he went after the Democrat proposal to establish a national single-payer health care system. He accused the left of wanting to spread radical socialism by gutting Medicare, which, also, is not true.

Trump also said he had defended protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Not true. No matter what Trump says, his Justice Department has said it will no longer support provisions in the Affordable Care Act that protect people with pre-existing conditions – and that has been a potent campaign issue for Ds running this November.

So, in the normal spirit of health care issues, the president has nothing with any potential to work.

What about the Democrats?

Well, they have little to add that has a chance of enticing the middle. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared last week that “health care is the issue that will define the November elections.”

He could be right for the wrong reason. Democrats could end up paying a big political price for signing up en masse for Senator Bernie Sanders’s government-run health-care agenda, which can be called a “single-payer system” or even, now, BernieCare.

Senator Sanders’ bill known as Medicare for All, which has been endorsed by 16 Senators, including almost all of the left’s leading 2020 presidential contenders – Senators Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren).

A companion House bill has attracted more than 120 co-sponsors, which is nearly two-thirds of the current Democratic caucus.

Medicare for All would finance health care through taxes instead of insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays. All care would then be “free,” at least in theory. Government would dramatically cut the reimbursement rates doctors receive for providing services. All this would lower administrative costs and make health care more efficient, or so we’re told. And we’re not supposed to call this “government-run health care,” though who do you think would make the payment decisions?

Trump noted in his op-ed that the plan would cost the federal government $32.6 trillion over 10 years. That figure is from an analysis by the Mercatus Center’s Charles Blahous, a respected researcher whose findings are in the ballpark of every serious analysis.

That spending figure amounts to 10.7 per cent of GDP in 2022 when the plan kicks in and then up from there. National defense—routinely derided as too expensive and wasteful—is a mere 3 per cent of GDP today. And brace yourself: “Doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections would be insufficient to finance the added federal costs of the plan,” Blahous says.

And that’s the good news. The truth is that BernieCare would essentially blow up the entire current health system. The Sanders bill would eliminate employer-sponsored insurance, which now covers some 150 million Americans. The sales pitch for that should be: If you like your health-care plan, we won’t let you keep it.

BernieCare would also blow up Medicare as we know it by creating a new health system that young and old would have to join.

So on it goes. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have any health care proposals with any potential to appeal to the middle. Republicans just want to shoot the Affordable Health Care Act, which is really not affordable at all. Democrats want a single payer system that would drive the federal budget ever deeper in debt.

America can do better than this. But we need political leaders who will move toward the middle and, as voters, we need to support that kind of enlightened leadership.

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.

In one of my last posts, I provided some thoughts about the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation issue, including my own, but also suggested that the episode would continue to dog our political system.

Well, this morning, I was very glad that one of my favorite columnist, Peggy Noonan, has returned to her job of appearing in the Wall Street Journal. I have missed her. She wrote very well about the Kavanaugh circus, including her compliments to Senator Susan Collins from Maine, who gave a memorable Senate floor speech to announce her affirmative Kavanaugh vote, a vote that will generate opposition in 2020 if she chooses to run again.

So, without apology, I simply reprint here Noonan’s column this morning that appeared under this headline:

Voices of Reason—and Unreason

Susan Collins put on a clinic in thoroughness and justice. Democrats need to stand up to the screamers.

She wrote about what I saw as a “circus” using words and analysis that I wish I would have been smart enough to use. So here is what she wrote.

What did the Kavanaugh controversy tell us about our historical moment? It underscored what we already know, that America is politically and culturally divided and that activists and the two parties don’t just disagree with but dislike and distrust each other. We know also the Supreme Court has come to be seen not only as a constitutional (and inevitably political) body but as a cultural body. It follows cultural currents, moods, assumptions. It has frequently brushed past the concept of democratic modesty to make decisions that would most peacefully be left to the people, at the ballot box, after national debate. So citizens will experience the court as having great power over their lives, and nominations to the court will inevitably draw passion. And this was a fifth conservative seat on a nine-person court.

But the Kavanaugh hearings had some new elements. There were no boundaries on inquiry, no bowing to the idea of a private self. Accusations were made about the wording of captions under yearbook photos. The Senate showed a decline in public standards of decorum. A significant number of senators no longer even pretend to have class or imitate fairness. The screaming from the first seconds of the first hearings, the coordinated interruptions, the insistent rudeness and accusatory tones—none of it looked like the workings of the ordered democracy that has been the envy of the world.

Two Republican senators this week wrote to me with a sound of mourning. One found it “amazing” and “terrifying” that “seemingly, and without very much thought, nearly half the United States Senate has abandoned the presumption of innocence in this country, all to achieve a political goal.” The other cited “a truly disturbing result: One of the great political parties abandoning the Constitutionally-based traditions of due process and presumption of innocence.”

At the very least, Senate Democrats overplayed their hand.

My bias in cases of sexual abuse and assault, and it is a bias, is in favor of the woman. I give her words greater weight because I have not in my personal experience seen women lie about such allegations, and I know the reasons they have, in the past, kept silent. If you know your biases and are serious, you will try to be fair—not to overcorrect but to maintain standards. On Sept. 16, the day the charges made by Christine Blasey Ford appeared in the Washington Post, I was certain that more witnesses and information would come forward. We would see where justice lay. The great virtue of the #MeToo movement is that the whole phenomenon was broken open by numbers and patterns—numbers of victims, patterns of behavior, and the deep reporting that uncovered both. In this case great reporters tried to nail down Ms. Ford’s story. But they did not succeed. The New Yorker story that followed was dramatic but unpersuasive, a hand grenade whose pin could not be pulled. The final allegation, about rape-train parties and spiked punch, was not in the least credible.

It was Ms. Ford’s story that was compelling, but in need of support or corroboration. It did not come.

It was a woman who redeemed the situation, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. In her remarks announcing her vote, she showed a wholly unusual respect for the American people, and for the Senate itself, by actually explaining her thinking. Under intense pressure, her remarks were not about her emotions. She weighed the evidence, in contrast, say, to Sen. Cory Booker, who attempted to derail the hearings from the start and along the way compared himself to Spartacus. Though Spartacus was a hero, not a malignant buffoon.

Ms. Collins noted that she had voted in favor of justices nominated by George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She considers qualifications, not party. She reviewed Brett Kavanaugh’s 12-year judicial record, including more than 300 opinions, speeches and law-review articles; she met with Judge Kavanaugh for more than two hours, and spoke with him again for an hour by phone with more questions.

She judged him centrist in his views and well within the mainstream of judicial thought. He believes, he told her, the idea of precedent is not only a practice or tradition but a tenet rooted in the Constitution.

As to Ms. Ford’s charges, since the confirmation process is not a trial, the rules are more elastic. “But certain fundamentally legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.”

“We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.” She called the gang-rape charge an “outlandish allegation” with no credible evidence.

At this point it was understood the Democrats had gone too far.

It is believable, said Ms. Collins, that Ms. Ford is a survivor of sexual assault and that the trauma “has upended her life.” But the four witnesses she named could not corroborate her account. None had any recollection of the party; her lifelong friend said under penalty of felony that she neither remembers such an event nor even knows Brett Kavanaugh.

Ms. Collins said she has been “alarmed and disturbed” by those who suggest that unless Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination was rejected, the Senate would somehow be condoning sexual assault: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

The atmosphere surrounding the nomination has been “politically charged” and reached “fever pitch” even before the Ford and other charges. It has been challenging to separate fact from fiction. But a decision must be made. Judge Kavanaugh’s record has been called one of “an exemplary public servant, judge, teacher, coach, husband, and father.” Her hope is he “will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have far fewer 5-4 decisions and so that public confidence in our judiciary and our highest court is restored.”

And so, she said, she would vote to confirm.

It was a master class in what a friend called “old-style thoroughness combined with a feeling for justice.”

A word on the destructive theatrics we now see gripping parts of the Democratic Party. The howling and screeching that interrupted the hearings and the voting, the people who clawed on the door of the court, the ones who chased senators through the halls and screamed at them in elevators, who surrounded and harassed one at dinner with his wife, who disrupted and brought an air of chaos, who attempted to thwart democratic processes so that the people could not listen and make their judgments:

Do you know how that sounded to normal people, Republican and Democratic and unaffiliated? It sounded demonic. It didn’t sound like “the resistance” or #MeToo. It sounded like the shrieking in the background of an old audiotape of an exorcism.

Democratic leaders should stand up to the screamers. They haven’t, because they’re afraid of them. But things like this spread and deepen.

Stand up to your base. It’s leading you nowhere good. And you know it.