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.

I have often thought about leadership, a trait we look for in politics, but rarely see.

That’s the point. Leadership is hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

Now, we see so-called political leaders competing for our time and attention without standing on principles that deserve our attention. As voters, we often don’t opt support real leadership when we see it , believing that, unless someone agrees with us, they are wrong.

We opt to support someone who happens to believe as we do, or who stands on a street corner, figuratively, and shouts for attention.

As a private sector lobbyist in Salem, Oregon, I looked for political leadership for about 25 years in the business.

I defined leadership this way:

1. First, you can tell a leader because he or she has followers. In other words, leadership requires followership – not as blind puppets, but as those who recognize that someone is worth following.
2. Second, leaders are office-holders who have the ability to bring disparate parties together to solve public policy problems. Call it the ability to lead toward compromise – or as I often call it, “the smart middle” – a lost art in the way politics is played these days.
3. Third, leaders demonstrate a sense of honesty and ethics, which, so often, appears to be missing from politics these days. They also have the ability to admit when they are wrong, which should be a credential, but often gets trumpeted by the media as an indication that a political leader doesn’t know what he or she is doing…otherwise, why the revision.

One of my favorite columnists, Peggy Noonan, whose work most often appears in the Wall Street Journal, wrote about leadership this weekend.

Her analysis was telling. Here are the points she made:

• A leader is someone who first of all means it, and you can tell. He or she sincerely holds the views he or she espouses: He or she is serious. Advancing them is his or her project and purpose.
• The ideas he or she stands for are not merely policy points on an issues matrix. They are held together by a central overarching intention. The new nation called America will survive and thrive while holding to its liberties. The Union must hold. The Cold War will be won, and we will win it. The intention springs from a general, but discernible political philosophy.
• Politicians who can’t turn the dots into a picture are not artists but failed pointillists. They don’t present a full picture. In the end it’s all just dots. No one ever voted for long for a dot.
• Great leaders are capable of arguing for the things they believe in. They can make the case. They can make you think along with them, logically, from point A to point B and beyond. Their words aren’t emotional, as politicians’ tend to be now in an attempt to make a sated audience feel something. (And also because they’re confused about what eloquence is; they think it means fancy.) When leaders rely on logic and fact, voters do feel something: gratitude at the implied respect, and a feeling of warmth at membership in a community of thought and belief.
• Eloquence in political leaders is desirable but not necessary. Too much is made of it even as the real thing disappears. It’s good if you can make the case in a way that is memorable, and that voters can hold in their heads. FDR and Reagan were great and eloquent. But Dwight Eisenhower led American forces through World War II, managed the early days of the Cold War, and built the interstate highway system. Yet listening to him talk was like making your way through children pillow fighting—lots of noise but nothing that made an impression. His actions were eloquent.
• Good leaders live in the real world. They don’t insist on grand ideologies they can squish down on your heads. They know the facts and work within them. They respect reality.
• A leader is aware he or she is the object of many eyes. This puts a responsibility on him or her to act in a certain way—with respect for his or her own dignity and yours. Even if he or she is not in the mood, he or she must uphold standards of presentation. Children are watching and taking cues. That means the future is watching.
• A leader isn’t just trying to survive for himself or herself, to hold on to power. Yet ,a leader tries always to survive. Good leaders are survivors: That’s part of how they show loyalty to what they stand for, by being there to stand for it. How to survive? Shift strategies and tactics but not principles. And admit when you’re wrong, in part because it’s refreshing. Politicians so rarely do it.
• A good leader knows the difference between stubbornness and perseverance. When you’re afraid to look like you backed down, to yourself or others, it’s stubbornness. When you’re willing to pay a price for where you stand, every day, it’s perseverance.

Noonan asks: “When you, the voter, aren’t presented with candidates who look like real leaders, what do you do? Pick the closest to the ideal. Fall back on the practical. Make do with what you have, which is what we usually do. “

In an excellent new book, “Presidents of War,” Michael Beschloss, says this about voting (even as we prepare to do so, or already have cast our ballots in Oregon’s vote-by-mail state):

“Choose a candidate whose values and heart and life experience you feel comfortable with, so that you can feel confident about the vast majority of political decisions they will make, if elected, that you will never hear about.”

So, as I vote, now that I am retired from lobbying, I am looking for aspirants who value leadership. The question is whether they can lead, not whether they agree with me or me with them.