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.

At a meeting earlier this month, a comment caught my attention. It was this:

“Anyone who thinks the private sector has all the answers to current problems in wrong.”

I agree, but a corollary is also true…this:

“The public sector does not have all the answers to current problems.”

The point is that policymakers these days should do what they don’t do often, which is to decide how to solve pressing public policy problems without reflexively turning in total to either the private or public sectors.

Many Democrats seem to believe that every problem deserves a government solution. Yet, government proves almost every day that its programs don’t always work. Plus, rarely are current government programs subjected what a call a “performance test” – is the program achieving what it was created to achieve and, if not, should it be scrapped?

Once in existence, government programs never go away.

Not, to be sure, many government programs prove their worth every day and, along the way in my career both in government and in the lobby, I advocated for adequate funding for important programs.

On the other side, many Republicans seem to believe that the private sector has all the answers. It doesn’t.

Even with the beneficence with such charity leaders as Bill and Melinda Gates, not to mention a number of others, there is no way for the private sector to carry the full load of social programs, as well as the country’s natural security interests, including in the military.

So, why don’t reasonable Democrats and reasonable Republicans – yes, there are a few left – get together and find the best of both private and public worlds.

Consider just one example – health care.

At the moment, we have a system in this country – the Affordable Health Care Act sometimes called “ObamaCare” – that was developed exclusively by Democrats. Not one Republican voted for it about eight years ago.

Plus, then and now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi admitted that she had not even read the bill when she presided over its passage.

Republicans?

Most of them just wanted to trash the new program and many of them are still heading down that pathway.

The alternative?

Find middle ground. Capitalize on the benefits of ObamaCare and take advantage of the private sector to make it even better.

To assure that I, a centrist without a party label, could not stand accused of just saying “no,” I have written about my health care policy proposals in the past. They are:

1. First, require all citizens to have health insurance, either by buying it if they can afford it, or by having it provided by government if they cannot. Without everyone in the to-be-insured pool, any system will collapse, much as occurred with large portions of ObamaCare. The very rationale for insurance is that the largest pool possible should be covered in order to spread the risk.

Think of this way. All of us who drive cars are required to have automobile insurance. If we don’t, we pay a price. The same policy should exist for health insurance.

2. Second, a catastrophic health insurance plan should be provided so that those who cannot afford regular insurance have an option for a lower-cost plan.
3. Third, any new middle-of-the-road health coverage approach should accommodate people with pre-existing health conditions.

I have mixed emotions about this because, inevitably, the price of insurance will go up with the added risk of covering pre-existing conditions. Yet, there is a reasonable social consensus that people should not be penalized financially for health problems largely outside of their control.

And, I firmly believe in the concept that human being should take care of other human beings (if they are willing to accept help) rather than leave the differently-abled to the scrap heap.

4. Fourth, any new plan should allow broad access to health-savings accounts (HSA). ObamaCare pushed millions of Americans into high-deductible insurance without giving them the opportunity to save and pay for care before insurance kicks in. There should be a one-time federal tax credit to encourage all Americans to open an HSA and begin using it to pay for routine medical bills. And HSAs, combined with high-deductible insurance, could be incorporated directly into the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

In all of this, there is a key role for the private sector — both hospitals and health insurers – a key role for government.

As the left-wing Democrats want to do, health care should not just be left to government in the form of a handout as is being advocated by many of those running for president on the D side. Take advantage of the skill and ability of the private sector to continue serving citizens who value the private options rather than just another government handout.

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.

As a person who was involved in and with government for about 40 years, I always had difficulty with many political labels in common use – then and now.

Labels never work well to describe fully someone’s political leanings.

For me, one of the best examples currently is the word “progressive.” Political writers usually attach the word to those on the left of the political spectrum, and on its face, the word conveys progress. Well, proposals from the left, especially the far left, do not represent progress, at least to me. They usually represent defeat for some aspect of our way of life in favor of more government.

Or, consider the word “democratic.” Many of those who fall under the label do not operate in a democratic way. They are more like autocrats who believe their way is best and it should be “the highway” for others who have the temerity to disagree.

I was reminded of all this when reading a column in the Washington Post by David Greenberg, a history professor at Rutgers University.

In his piece, he asked this question: Is any word misused more often in the news media than “liberal”?

He wrote: “Here’s one example from the New York Times last spring: ‘The House Democratic (there’s that word again) campaign arm is nearing open warfare with the party’s rising liberal wing as political operatives close to Speaker Nancy Pelosi try to shut down primary challenges before what is likely to be a hard-fought campaign next year to preserve the party’s shaky majority.’

“Hidden within this 46-word thicket is the strange idea that liberals are at war with the party’s leadership and seeking to oust its long-serving incumbents — who are themselves, of course, liberals.”

Greenberg claims that, for several years now, reporters and pundits have been incorrectly applying the word “liberal” when they mean leftist.

Liberalism, he adds, has been the governing philosophy of the Democrat Party since Franklin D. Roosevelt, if not Woodrow Wilson. Liberal could be assumed to be a doctrine of liberty, equality, justice and individual rights that relies, in the modern age, on a strong federal government for enforcement.

Most prominent Democrats, including established veterans like former vice president Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, are liberal.

So why, Greenberg asks, has liberal come to mean “radical” in seemingly popular usage? In recent years, what was once a left-wing fringe of the Democrat Party has grown significantly. Instead of describing these newcomers and insurgents as “further to the left” than mainstream liberals, reporters succumb to a convenient shorthand — politicians are deemed “more liberal” than the liberals.

More from Greenberg: “The muddying of the word ‘liberalism’ mirrors, in some ways, what happened to ‘conservative.’ As the Republican Party moved rightward, its most extreme members — whose politics were quite radical and once properly labeled ‘reactionary’— often were confusingly described as ‘more conservative’ than their cohorts.

“This reshuffling of terms is problematic, because both conservatism and liberalism are sets of ideas, not simply labels conveniently to identify one half of the political spectrum (itself an imperfect metaphor). Moving left doesn’t necessarily make one ‘more liberal.’ At a certain point, the traveler leaves the province of liberalism for one that is more correctly identified as socialism, radicalism or leftism.

“Not every politician or person fits neatly into one category or the other. The labels represent tendencies, not fixed identities.”

Some liberals – surely not Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or their ilk on the left extreme — also reject far left dogma by seeing a vital role for private business in generating wealth, economic opportunity and innovation.

The battle last year over bringing Amazon’s headquarters to Queens pitted liberal arguments from New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio against left-wing ones from the likes of Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

In the end, Ocasio-Cortez won and Amazon took its millions of dollars of investment and thousands of jobs elsewhere, which cost Ocasio-Cortez’ constituents a lot.

Further, terms like “centrist” and “moderate” (ones I claim for myself) are nowadays flung around as terms of insult or abuse, as badges of weakness or tepidness.

No, centrist or moderate should be viewed as badges of courage.

So, I say from my post in the cheap seats out West, eschew labels – including liberal and conservative – when they don’t reflect the complicated description of persons involved in politics or of citizens interested in political processes.

That’s a word to the wise for all of us in today’s tinged era of politics when the process is marred more by fighting and impugning the integrity of those with whom you may disagree than accepting differences and working toward middle-ground solutions.

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.

On the golf course this week, I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine who, like me, has been involved in politics here in Oregon for many years.

Also like me, he usually eschews talking about politics on the golf course for fear of getting into arguments, which deflect from involvement in the game.

This was a bit different if only because both of us knew we had had just about enough of a scurrilous president and his administration, if you could call what he does “administration” in the first place.

My friend made this point.

If he was in Congress, he said, he would have no choice but to vote his conscience rather than to vote, based on some political calculus, to preserve his chances for re-election. If he did the latter, he said he couldn’t live with himself.

In this case, he would be very wiling to consider and vote for impeachment articles against President Donald Trump, even if his political base, somehow, supported Trump.

A story in the Washington Post this morning made the same point in better language than I could have used.

“Republicans,” the story said, “will be judged by history on whether they were judicial and operating on behalf of the United States or just rubber-stamping Trump’s behavior, It puts Republicans in the Senate in a moral conundrum.” [The quote was from historian Douglas Brinkley.]

Impeachment stories from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post this morning paint a confusing picture of how members of Congress are reacting to what appears to me to be a crisis of our democracy.

Let me add quickly that, in the spirit of an impeachment process itself, the process has to play out rather than reaching decisions based only on early and incomplete information.

I don’t often like to quote Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank because he has made a career in recent years by excoriating Trump, seemingly writing every day about the mercurial and dishonest president (when, to be sure, there is so much to write about).

In a column earlier this week, Milbank asked a good series of questions about what he called the duplicity of Republicans seeking to support Trump.

He asked, “Would Republicans, with their votes on Trump’s impeachment, condone the actions of, say, future President Elizabeth Warren when she:

• Defies congressional power of the purse by unilaterally raiding the Pentagon budget to finance her pet projects?
• Rejects the authority of congressional oversight, disregards subpoenas and refuses to furnish documents, including a whistleblower complaint about the president deemed “urgent” by the intelligence community?
• Is found by an independent prosecutor appointed by her own administration to have engaged in 10 possible instances of obstruction of justice but is not charged because regulations prohibit such a move against a sitting president?
• Approves and reimburses secret payments, in violation of campaign finance law to a person threatening to put out damaging information about her?
• Fires an FBI director who refuses to call off a probe of one of her close associates?
• Declares federal law enforcement officials who investigate her guilty of treason, demands they be put under investigation and succeeds in getting one of them fired and brought to the brink of indictment?
• Rescinds the security clearances of a former CIA director critical of her, as well as the press credentials of journalists who criticize her administration?
• Persuads a foreign leader not to admit Republican members of Congress into his country?
• Grounds the jet used for official business by the congressional leader of the Republican Party?
• Repeatedly releases highly classified intelligence, some to a foreign enemy and some only to Democrats
• Threatens to cut off highway funds and disaster aid to states and territories controlled by Republicans, and declares she has the “absolute” right to move criminals to jurisdictions governed by Republicans?
• Funnels millions of taxpayer dollars to her own businesses, pressures federal agencies and international organizations to do business with her personal enterprises, invites foreign governments to pay millions of dollars to her businesses, and rejects a law requiring her to provide Congress with her tax returns?
• Calls for a boycott of the parent company of a media outlet critical of her, threatens an antitrust action against the owner of another media outlet critical of her, says she can unilaterally order businesses to disinvest from a country and calls for federal punishment of individual businesses she doesn’t like?
• Circumvents the Constitution’s advice-and-consent provision by running the government with “acting” officials (unqualified but loyal to her) not confirmed by the Senate?
• Offers to pardon those who commit crimes enforcing her policies, questions the authority of certain judges because they are GOP appointees and pardons a political ally who ignored court orders?
• Without congressional approval, establishes a de facto network of internment camps, run under inhumane conditions, for a class of people she disdains?
• And, finally, asks and coerces foreign governments to sabotage her Republican opponents’ campaigns?

“Republicans, Milbank concluded, “have blessed all of this and more with their silence. They must now state their positions explicitly. If they vote to accept such conduct by this and, therefore, future presidents, the American experiment will be badly damaged. But if they aren’t at least forced to answer the question, it has already failed.”

As is the case with my friend in the golf course, even as I wait for the impeachment process to play out, I would vote to convict Trump.

He deserves no less than to lose his office for the high crimes he has committed.

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.

Why would I choose to comment about the to-ing and fro-ing in Washington, D.C. over the prospect of subjecting President Donald Trump to impeachment, with, at least it could be said, an uncertain end to that process?

Why, indeed?

Because, from my post in the cheap seats out West, I know just enough to be dangerous, so might as well go on record…plus, I’ll feel better if I do.

I was struck this morning by two views of impeachment provided by two regular columnists in the Washington Post – Hugh Hewitt and Michael Gerson.

From Hewitt: “Which is essentially the way House Democrats (mis)handled the guaranteed-to-get-him-impeached rough transcript of the phone call in July between President Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Many Democrats, egged on by a complicit Greek chorus — media artists formerly known as “the echo chamber” — were stuck with on Wednesday. Out they marched, declaring the empty vault of the transcript a bill of particulars against Trump that would require the drafting of articles of impeachment and their immediate passage not just by a select committee but by the whole House.”

From Gerson: “By his own admission, the president of the United States urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open a criminal investigation of the son of a political rival. Trump denies that this request involved a quid pro quo. But with Ukraine engaged in conflict with Russian-backed separatists, and with $250 million in U.S. military aid being held up (at the time) for “review,” the threat did not need to be explicit to be palpable and powerful. A mob boss doesn’t need to issue threats personally to be feared and obeyed. And that is what the Trump presidency increasingly resembles — a criminal family sending out their slimy factotum (a part played enthusiastically by Rudolph W. Giuliani) to “fix” what needs fixing.”

First, kudos to the Washington Post for carrying both views. That’s exactly what should happen in America – sharing views, even if the views compete. The Post’s lead editorial this morning said it was past time for impeachment just as the other national paper I read, the Wall Street Journal, took the other side, saying impeachment wasn’t warranted on the basis of Trumps phone call with Ukraine where there was “no specific quid pro quo.”

So, who is right?

I’ll leave the editorials to others.

But, for what it’s worth, in the case of Hewitt and Gerson, I side with Gerson because, as he put it, “The Constitution assumes that the president will interact with foreign governments to seek the interests and express the values of the United States.

“With Trump, nothing decent can be assumed. By making corrupt personal requests of a foreign power, the president is not only misusing $250 million in leverage, he is misusing the presidency itself. His actions may constitute bribery, extortion and/or the violation of campaign-finance laws.

“But his breach of public trust is ultimately a more serious matter. Trump has violated his oath of office by using his office for selfish gain.

“Here, we need to be clear. Treating the presidency in this fashion is not only corrupt, but unpatriotic. Trump is not only a preening, prating fool; he has set his own interests above the interests of the nation. He has replaced love of country with a kind of self-love that dishonors the institution he leads.”

The reality is that, as Trump and his allies work to defend him, the impeachment process could work to the benefit of his re-election chances in 2020. Such is political life these days.

Trumpians will assume that the Democrats are out to get Trump because they still are not willing to admit that he won the presidency in 2016. So, they believe, it is the Ds who are behaving erratically and it is Trump who will benefit.

I hold this bottom-line view: If the impeachment process works to Trump’s benefit, it is still a process that must proceed despite that possibility. The character of this country is too important to let a scofflaw like Trump get away with “setting his own interests above the interests of the nation” and doing so, not as a matter of strategy, but as a clown in the Oval Office who assumes that he is always right, no matter the subject or the case.

He deserves to be held to account for the way he has continued to dishonor the country he leads – or, at least supposedly, leads.

So, let the process begin and let Trump defend himself…if he can.

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.

In the immediate aftermath of an experience with socialized medicine in England, the time seems right to reflect on the experience.

Here is what started my sojourn with medicine in the U.K., along with my wife who guided me through the experience.

After boarding our cruise ship for a run down the Atlantic Coast from Amsterdam to Dover, to Lisbon, I made what now is a clear mistake by using prescription motion sickness ear patches. Either on their own, or in combination with other medications, they sparked a reaction in me that involved dizziness, slurred speech, hallucinations, and poor depth perception.

I basically have of no memory of most of the next two days as I was seen by the ship’s doctor, then went by ambulance to a hospital in Ashford, England and stayed there for a battery of tests over 14 hours – yes, 14 hours — including about five EKGs, two brain scans, an angio-gram and various blood tests.

In the end, I received a clean bill of health. A stroke, heart attack and other problems were determined not to have been involved. An adverse reaction to medication was the culprit.

As I write this from home – and I am very glad to be home – here’s a bottom line:

The entire experience with U. K. medicine didn’t cost us a dime!

What would have happened had we been in the United States?

Well, it is likely that, in advance of each test beyond the clearly emergent ones, we would have been asked if we wanted to go through with them, including paying for them.

We would have been asked to pay or at least identify our health insurance company. We would have answered both, but there would have been a cost, either for our insurance company, for us, or for both.

We might have moved through the system more quickly in the U.S., underlining a key question here: What is more important, thoroughness or speed?

Upon reflection, I would pick thoroughness, given the possibility of serious health jeopardy.

The experience provided us (my wife and me) with a first-hand experience with socialized medicine in Europe. You could argue both sides of the question – which system is best, the one in Europe or the one in the U.S. And, of course, neither is perfect.

Further, someone is always paying for the services I received; it just wasn’t me in this case.

My fond hope, as a long-time health care lobbyist, now retired, is that the best minds would get in the room in this country and do the hard work of hammering out an effective health care system in the middle – one that capitalizes on the best of Europe and the best of the U.S.

The task would be “to give and to get,” which is the very nature of political compromise at its best.

So far, politicians in the U.S. — from the president, to his Administration, to Members of Congress, to governors, to state legislatures, to state Executive Branch officials have been unable – or perhaps unwilling – to do the hard work of compromise.

Experiences of the type I just had overseas only serve to underline the need for action. Find the best of Europe. Find the best of the U.S.

Do something.

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.

Remember that old question – what did he/she know and when did he/she know it?

The question, originally posed in relation to the Watergate scandal, could be used today here in Oregon to describe a new public records controversy which probably won’t go away any time soon. And the question is this: What did those in charge of public records law implementation know and when did they know it?

I choose to comment on this because, truth be told, I was assigned to handle numerous public records issues when I served in state government in Oregon, as well as when I lobbied for the Oregon Association of Broadcasters at the Capitol.

The presumption, underlined by every Attorneys General in recent years, was this:

All government records are public unless there is a specific law that allows them to be withheld – and, in those cases, if it is a close call, err on the side of public release.

Here is what the Oregonian newspaper wrote about the current controversy:

“A newly released memo outlines tensions between Governor Kate Brown’s General Counsel Misha Isaak and Oregon Public Records Advocate Ginger McCall.

“Attorneys for the governor repeatedly sought to stop the state’s official transparency advocate from finding and fixing weaknesses in Oregon’s public records law, and Brown was fully briefed on those developments in May, a newly released document shows.”

There is much more in the Oregonian, as well as comments from the governor who disputes notions that she set to compromise the new law. As for me, from the cheap seats in South Salem, I posit these conclusions:

• It is almost never a good idea to name a public employee and presume they will be independent or convey upon them some kind of independent status.

All public employees should be subject to someone, either a state government manager or a statewide elected official, such as the governor. And, then, if there are problems, someone at or near the top should be held accountable for those problems, either to agree they exist or propose ways to fix them.

For me, this issue arose in relation to work I have been doing recently on a committee created at the behest of Oregon Common Cause. It was created to consider ways to inject ethics considerations back into public life, both for those in elective or appointive office and for the public in general.

In this context, we heard that the Federal Ethics Office was supposed to be independent of both the Executive and Legislative Branches. Without a competent executive director – and there was one until he recently retired – the independent status would have made the office king or queen.

Better to create the office as an integral part of government, then hold those accountable for their record in supervising it.

• It is almost never a good idea to create a new government position and expect that person, alone, to comply with a complicated state law, in this case public records law.

A tendency in government is to create something new – a new position or even a new agency – rather than require what already exists to function well government. Too often, it’s the way of government – create something new to manage something old.

In this case, there is well-established public records law, ORS 192.500 (including at least specific exemptions in such cases as the personal information about government employees, including their home addresses and phone numbers) and the task should be for the legislature and other high elected officials to make sure the law works as it was intended to work.

Hold agencies and individuals accountable to comply with both the letter and the spirit of the law. Don’t create something new and presume that produce the needed fix.

The current public records controversy will stay with us for some time. The media, which is invested in public records, will make sure it does.

So be it.

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.

To hear left-wing Democrats talk as they run for president, you’d think our country needs to be changed so dramatically it would no longer be recognized as a center of capitalism.

Several of those on the far left, including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, want to make the United States into a socialist country.

They must think, I guess, that trashing this country will help them win a trip to the Oval Office.

I hope not. To be sure, I want a centrist to emerge, someone who can defeat one of the worst presidents in U.S. history – Donald Trump. And someone who will work to improve our country, not trash it.

A couple personal thoughts about capitalism vs. socialism.

MY OWN SITUATION: Back in 1990, with another partner, I formed a company that came to be called CFM Strategic Communications. We set out to create and build a company that would provide several services – (a) lobbying services at the local, state and federal levels, (b) public relations services for public and private sector clients; and (c) public opinion services to help public and private sector clients understand the universes in which they operated.

Twenty-five years later, CFM is still functioning as a small business, though I am retired and now serve as an emeritus partner.

Without capitalism in this country, there would have been no opportunity to succeed with CFM.  In socialism as advocated by Sanders, Warren and others, we would have had no incentive to provide for ourselves as partners, as well as for those who worked for us because those individuals always shared in our profits.

We would have been just waiting for the next handout from government those on the far left believe would be better than business effort and enterprise.

A VISIT TO PRAGUE IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC: On a recent international trip, my wife and I spent three days in Prague, which no longer is a communist country.

We were struck by comments from our tour guide, who said she grew up in a communist state, but now treasures the freedom she enjoys in a non-communist system.

She said she is now able to think for herself, to speak, and to be creative. Without fear of reprisal.

She has no desire for the Czech Republic to return to communism, which she fears is an agenda in some parts of the country.

So, the question is this: Can those with a capitalist commitment improve how they operate in this country?

Of course, there always is room for those who have earned so much to share with those who have less. Consider the example of Bill Gates, who made a fortune as he started and led Microsoft for years, but, through his foundation, has shared his wealth with others around the world.

Sharing with others was the subject of a recent sermon at the church in Salem my wife have attended for more than 30 years, Salem Alliance. To remember a sermon several weeks after it was given says something about the quality of the subject!

The title was, “What is Our Responsibility, as citizens and Christians, to help the Quartet of the Vulnerable.” The quartet was defined to include the poor, children (sometimes orphans), widows and refugees.

All of them need our help, both in our roles as citizens and as Christians.

Scripture has much to say about this, including what may be the best verse on the subject – Romans 12:13:

“Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.”

Sounds simple, but it isn’t.

It requires commitment – commitment of the type that shows how those who have thrived in capitalism are willing to share what they have earned with others. And, if done enough, the sharing will help, in our topsy-turvy political world, to illustrate the value in our current way of life, not the value in turning to socialism.

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.

This, remember, is one of three departments I run with a free hand to operate them as I see fit.

The others are the Department of Pet Peeves and the Department of Bits and Pieces.

So, here are more good quotes.

FROM MAX BOOT IN THE WASHINGTON POST/”At one level, it’s pathetic and even amusing that President Donald Trump is fabricating quotes to boost his fragile ego. But at another level, it’s terrifying, because he isn’t your dotty old uncle boasting of having landed a 500-pound marlin.

“There are real-world consequences when the most powerful man in the world lives in a make-believe universe where Greenland is for sale, video games v cause mass shootings, climate change is no big deal, and “trade wars are good and easy to win.”

“The unanswerable mystery is whether Trump is consciously lying or whether he believes his own drivel. The latter possibility is more terrifying, yet the former is scant comfort, either. Best-case scenario: The president is a pathological liar who repeatedly utters falsehoods that no one who does not work at Fox News could possibly believe. Worst case: He is a fantasist who cannot tell lies from truths, fantasy from reality.”

Comment: True, which is a hard word to utter in relation to Trump who has amassed a record for lying – more than 12,000 times, according to the Post’s Fact-Checker column. As Boot says, Trump believes his own stuff — and wields a black sharpie pen to prove it.

FROM JENNIFER RUBIN IN THE WASHINGTON POST/”He’s an embarrassment plain and simple. Donald Trump is the anti-McCain. Not only is he unhinged and unsteady, not only is he incapable of looking farther than his nose when it comes to foreign policy, but he also would rather lose a war than lose an election.”

Comment: Again, true. I have come to a belief, from my position in the cheap seats out West, that Trump is mentally deranged. And all of us as Americans are in danger as a result.

FROM AMANDA RIPLEY IN THE WASHINGTON POST: “As a journalist specializing in disasters, I have seen…creative denial in all manner of catastrophes — from market crashes to hurricanes. This summer, I saw it again, while watching the Democrat debates. First came the self-serious moderators, trolling for conflict. Next came the candidates, powdered and prepped. Cue the opening statements!”

Comment: Ripley has ideas about what to do about the presidential debate issue, just as we are preparing for another sham one for the Ds. Her idea:

“To help identify candidates, moderators could ask different questions. For example: Who in your inner circle routinely challenges your beliefs? Explain why someone might oppose abortion or gun control and still be a good person. Can you think of solutions to these issues so that neither side would have to compromise their core beliefs?

“Or get rid of the debate format altogether. Is the United States really yearning for more argument? Instead, give candidates an exercise, like in a real job interview. Put them in American living rooms where they listen to people whose life experiences and beliefs challenge their own. See which candidates can stay curious, without necessarily agreeing.

“What happens when you put Pete Buttigieg in the home of an African American family in Chicago? Or if you put Elizabeth Warren in a white evangelical Christian home in rural Tennessee? What if these families decided who “won” this contest — based on which candidate talked with them, not down to them?”

Good approach. Will it happen? Probably not, but anything is better than the drivel which passes for a Democrat presidential debate these days.

Now, later this year, add Trump to the mix and we have something not worth watching.

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.

The writer, a political scientist, skewers both sides in political debates these days.

There is no middle ground. If you disagree with me, you are nuts and I am right.

Sound like President Donald Trump. Yes. But it also sounds like the most of the Democrats who want to take on Trump in 2020.

Here is what struck me as one of the best paragraphs in the NY Times piece:

“These claims of corruption and rigging make for a strange campaign of ideas, like the one Warren is lauded for waging and an even more bizarre populism of the kind associated with Trump and Sanders. Each of them deflects criticism by delegitimizing opposition. Trump may have perfected that art, but Democrats should be cautious about imitating it. Accusations of corruption are rooted in the assumption that one’s positions are so obviously correct that the only explanation for opposing them is that the opponent has been bought and his or her supporters have been brainwashed.”

So, here is a reprint of the entire piece because of its trenchant analysis.

The Shallow Cynicism of ‘Everything Is Rigged’

Why do the president and many of his opponents act as though American political life is just another film noir?

By Greg Weiner

[Weiner is a political scientist and was a senior Senate aide to Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska.]

President Trump wants his supporters to know that he is still draining the swamp over which he has presided for nearly three years. One of his Democratic rivals, Senator Elizabeth Warren, says Americans are trapped in a “rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else.” Her colleague and fellow candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, calls it “a corrupt political system designed to protect the wealthy and the powerful.”

These claims of corruption and rigging make for a strange campaign of ideas, like the one Warren is lauded for waging and an even more bizarre populism of the kind associated with Trump and Sanders. Each of them deflects criticism by delegitimizing opposition. Mr. Trump may have perfected that art, but Democrats should be cautious about imitating it. Accusations of corruption are rooted in the assumption that one’s positions are so obviously correct that the only explanation for opposing them is that the opponent has been bought and his or her supporters have been brainwashed.

This corruption chatter, a mainstay of American political history that has accelerated in recent years, is unhealthy for political conversation. It is a film noir conception of politics, in which everyone is good or evil, mostly evil, and no one simply disagrees. It is also inaccurate. American politics has never been cleaner of classic corruption — of the cash-under-the-table Teapot Dome variety — than it is now. The bigger problem is that the political puritanism that sees corruption around every corner actually makes it harder to address the issues in whose name it is invoked.

The contemporary scandal, it is often said, is not that criminal corruption occurs but rather that the political system is legally rigged. It supposedly takes the form of campaign contributions that, Sanders says, enable corporations to “literally buy elections.” “This is, literally, false. Money unquestionably influences elections. But the candidate with the most votes, a commodity that cannot be legally bought or sold, always wins (except when it comes to the presidency, a discussion for another day).

What Sanders means to say, of course, is that money allows those with an opinion on, or a stake in, a given issue to buy the means of persuading voters that the spenders are right. That was what he meant when, in the second Democrat presidential debate, he defended his single-payer health insurance proposal and warned darkly — although how surprising was it, really? — that private health insurers had purchased advertising time during the program to register their disagreement.

But this “buys” elections only to the extent Sanders is claiming voters are passive automatons incapable of discernment. This is a paternal populism according to which voters need politicians to protect them from being duped by ensuring they are never spoken to in the first place.

Whether this activity on the part of health insurers is corrupt hinges on what corruption, which is notoriously hard to define, actually means. Critics of the campaign finance system typically warn of a rigged “quid pro quo” arrangement, in which a donor contributes to a campaign on the assumption that the recipient will support the donor’s interests.

But if this is the definition of corruption, it seems to apply equally to the health insurer that spends $25,000 to maintain its right to offer its product and to the grandmother who sends Sanders $25 and asks him to protect Social Security. The two are separated by degree rather than kind. For her part, Warren thinks it is corrupt for the wealthy to defend their economic interests, but her campaign also plays to what she believes is the self-interest of her supporters. Why is one corrupt but not the other?

In either case, the money is useful only to buy the means of persuading and mobilizing voters. It would be irrational to do something that alienates voters in order to attract money whose purpose is to persuade them.

That voters are not simply dupes of contributors is clear from the fact that, in the 2016 Republican primary, when Jeb Bush was a powerhouse fund-raiser and Donald Trump relied on the cost-free device of Twitter, there was little evident comparison between money spent and votes received. American voters often blame money in politics for political outcomes they dislike. In fact, the constitutional system is designed to require majorities to persist in supporting something concrete before they prevail. It is difficult to identify instances in American history of an electoral majority wanting something specific that it has not eventually gotten.

Clearly, members of Congress are far wealthier on average than their constituents. This may affect their thinking, but not nearly as much as the fact that each of them holds his or her office by the permission of voters. It is also difficult to deny that contributions correlate with policy outcomes on some issues — although causation is difficult to establish because most major policies trigger spending on both sides — or that large contributors enjoy enhanced access to politicians, who are susceptible to lobbying.

The question is which issues these contributors are able to influence. The answer is those to which voters do not pay attention. This tends to happen in a system that attempts — as in Trump’s industrial policy or Sanders’ democrat socialism — to dictate precise economic distributions and consequently involves itself in far more than voters can monitor. Rent-seeking — the attempt to use government power to tilt the market in one’s favor — is certainly a problem. But it arises not simply from the fact that economic favors are sought but also from the fact that they are provided.

Anthropomorphizing economic “systems” that are actually the products of trillions of individual choices further confuses the issue. Warren may wish to describe the results of those choices as kicking “dirt” on workers, but there is no single identifiable system doing the kicking.

All the claims of rigged systems that now saturate American politics make reasoned conversation more difficult. Whether one supports or opposes it, for example, abolishing the private insurance that hundreds of millions of Americans hold is certainly a radical proposition. Is it really impossible for anyone other than the venal or the duped to oppose the idea?

In reality, the activities swept into the label of corruption — campaign finance and quid-pro-quo negotiation — are important means of building coalitions. Whatever their merit, Ms. Warren’s ambitious plans to remake the economy are doomed unless she is elected along with a Democratic Senate, which will only happen if money is spent to persuade voters to dislodge entrenched Republican incumbents. Given the advantages of incumbency — incumbents, for example, do not have to spend money to garner name recognition — they almost certainly will have to be outspent.

Similarly, earmarked, pork-barrel spending — which the Republican House of Representatives prohibited in 2011 as part of the Tea Party wave — is an invaluable tool for assembling bipartisan majorities for legislation because it helps members of Congress see the good a bill does for their constituents.

The go-to argument that everything is corrupt is, in fact, not intellectual engagement at all. It is an escape from the responsibility to defend one’s position on its merits. It is polarizing because it turns argument, which is healthy in a republic, into accusation. It yields cheap cynicism that falsely regards outcomes with which one disagrees as the product of corruption rather than diversity of opinion. The result is intellectual paralysis, since shallow cynicism does away with the need to make or listen to an argument at all.

This puritan strain in American politics makes it more difficult to find common ground because it stigmatizes, and therefore hardens, opposition. How can there be a legitimate compromise with corruption? It would be healthier for politicians to make their best arguments for their positions, let their opponents argue back and accept the realities that defending one’s own interests is normal, that honest people disagree, and that the candidate who persuades more of them prevails.