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 to 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 press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as 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.

First, a confession. I did not watch either of the two Democrat debates this week, though I did read about them in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, which had different takes on the process.

Second, it may too early for there to be any conclusions to these debates, if that’s what they really were.

There is a long time, an eternity in politics, until we face the general election.

Still, based on what I read, I thought the winner was Trump. What occurred in the debates could drive many voters Trump’s way, even if they have questions about the character of the buffoon who sits in the Oval Office.

Many of the Democrats advocate policies so far left of center that they mean the America we knew and know would go away in favor of a government state. Everything is “free” and guess who pays for it – you and me.

Here is the way columnist Peggy Noonan described the “debates” in her piece for the Wall Street Journal:

“The Democrats are showing little hopefulness; they’re not voicing any expansive sense of faith in their country. I understand it is the job of challengers to lambaste the status quo, to criticize, to say, ‘This isn’t working.’ But the rhetorical atmosphere of the administration has been grim for some time. American carnage, cities are dead and swimming in garbage, violent rats are eating our feet, throw ’em out, lock ’em up.

“So you’d think challengers would quickly follow their critiques with a certain modified strategic confidence. Instead they’re out-grimming the president. We chain and cage women and children, no one here has ever seen a doctor, if you have a heart attack on the street you’ll be lucky if they bother to step over your body, they’ll probably use you as an ashtray, cops are racists who hope you commit crimes so they can beat you, corporations have rape rooms.

“It is extreme and weirdly negative. You’d think someone would pop out with, ‘Jake, let me tell you why America doesn’t constantly make me want to throw up in my mouth. Or, ‘Dana, I’ve actually met a few Americans and we’re painting them a little darkly here.’”

With Noonan I ask – where is the optimism for the future of America, albeit with commitments to fix problems and make improvements?

Washington Post writers put it this way:

“In one way, the debate was exactly what had been expected, a series of attacks against former vice president Joe Biden, the leader in the polls who had faltered in the first debate in Miami and needed to rebound in Detroit. He accomplished that, but barely so and perhaps by opening himself up to future criticisms.

“In another way, the second night of debating was not at all what Democrats had expected or likely wanted. By the end of the evening, the candidates had done as much to make a case against one another as against the president, without offering much in the way of an aspirational message or connecting directly with the voters they will need to win the presidential election.

“The reality is that little changed as a result of the debate. The absence of clear winners and the absence of the emergence of a candidate with a hopeful message for a broader audience produced a status quo ending.”

Ditto for me.

Further, Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal said Democrats “are working hard to repel swing voters.”

Rove said Democrats will lose in 2020 if enough Americans believe the “big ideas” threaten their families, communities, values and pocketbooks.

Americans often like bold, aspirational ideas, such as sending a man to the moon. It’s less clear that they like revolutions and forced upheavals in their own lives, not to mention loss of control over important decisions and massive raids on their pocketbooks.

Democrat presidential candidates are outbidding one another with structural transformations of America. The cumulative effect, Rove suggests, may be to saddle the Democrat Party with an ambitious leftist agenda that repels swing voters in 2020 and hands the election to Trump.

There also was one more piece of disquieting analysis about the debates. This. Among Ds, centrist approaches are viewed as in the past, not the future. Specifically, centrist approaches are viewed as being only for older people, including me, not for many in the younger set who appear to want upheaval and huge change so America is not the country it once was.

If that’s true – if older people want the middle – I plead guilty. And, I hope Democrats find a way to appeal to centrists by fielding a candidate who will have a chance to oust Trump from office before he inflicts even more damage on our country.

For the moment, I suspect he wants more debates among Democrats so they tear each down without much regard for the outcome or, at least so far, for the need to beat Trump.