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 hope the answer to the question is the headline is the private sector.

But, increasingly, Democrats who run the U.S. House, as well as those who aspire to be president, appear to believe that the key to economic growth is government – more government.

Now, I emphasize that government is not all bad and, clearly, government plays a role in helping to produce economic gains.

But if you listen to contenders for president on the left, they believe that everything rides on government – Medicare for All, free college tuition, forgiving student loan debts, repatriation for past misdeeds, and a so-called “Green New Deal.”

I have been “biden” my time for Joe to run.

I mean Joe Biden. I have various questions about his long record of public service, but it is at least a “long record” that includes his time as U.S. Senator and vice president. If experience matters when you make a hire – and I believe it does – Biden has an enviable record.

Given other alternatives among Democrats seeking the nation’s highest political office, Biden is a breath of fresh air. He has not veered so far left as to be off any normal political spectrum. He has not adopted the wacko-left policies of Senators Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren and, at least so far, he has not preened for TV cameras as Senator Kamala Harris has done.

So, I hope he stays in the middle and, thus, presents a viable alternative to the worst president in U.S. history, Donald Trump.

That said, the U.S. economy is thriving under Trump, though much of the reason for growth cannot and should not be ascribed to Trump’s credit, especially given his China tariff actions late, which have driven the stock market into a major retreat.

Still, he will take credit for economic gains and it will be up to candidates like Biden to contend they’ll boost the economy, too.

In April, the U.S. added 263,000 jobs, notching a record 103 straight months of job gains and signaling the current economic expansion shows little sign of stalling.

The unemployment rate has fallen to 3.6 per cent, the lowest since 1969. The official unemployment rate has been at or below 4 per cent for more than a year.

Hiring was strong across most sectors with especially large gains in business services (76,000 jobs added), construction (33,000 jobs added) and health care (27,000 jobs added).

Meanwhile, the economic model under President Barack Obama and Biden, effectively shared by all Biden’s current Democrat rivals, is that government primarily should guide the economy.

An emerging story line of the campaign is that against Sanders’s socialism or Warren’s regulatory militancy, Biden offers a moderate, center-left alternative.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Obama’s term was, to borrow a Biden-esque phrase, the most left-wing presidency in our lifetime, with the vice president, unfortunately, happily in tow. It represented the idea of the private economy as a zero-sum abstraction whose only utility is to create revenue that gets extracted by the government and administered as benefits to the public. For modern Democrats, the private economy has become basically a strung-up piñata.

“The Obama administration imposed an unprecedented array of regulations on every sector of the U.S. economy—finance, energy, telecommunications, health care and on and on.

“Across eight years of Obama’s presidency—during which he and Biden gave speech after speech about helping the middle class—the economy grew annually by about 2 per cent.”

The current growth rate is more than 3 per cent.

I hope Biden will hew more to the center as he runs for president. The center is where the private sector produces economic gains and government does its part to make economic gains possible in the spirit of not taxing everything and everyone and not imposing regulation after regulation.

I argue for balance, which is becoming harder and harder to achieve in a political system that is more oriented to appealing to bases than to the public interest.

I hope Biden continues to hew toward the center.