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 headline for this blog this morning captures an unfortunate, not to mention foreboding, reality in this country. It is this:

Trump wins because debates Democrats hold illustrate they cannot get their act together to propose a candidate who is not so far left as to be off the political spectrum. Given this reality, even centrist Americans could be drawn toward Trump, which could have continued with the most current date now just concluded.

In a piece this week for the Wall Street Journal, Bobby Jindal, the former governor of Louisiana, put it this way:

“Lots of voters dislike the president, but will be convinced to vote for him by seeing his opponents.”

That’s why, from my post in the cheap seats out West, I have hoped for months, if not years, that a centrist candidate would emerge who would call Americans to love their country rather than, figuratively at least, yell on every street corner about how anyone who doesn’t agree with them are nuts.

Or, as is manifestly the case with Trump, put themselves first and the country be damned.

More from Jindal: “The Republican National Committee should offer to be the official sponsor of a weekly Democrat presidential debate. There would be no better advertisement for President Trump’s re-election. Every time the Democrat presidential contenders gather together, it’s a contest between the merely delusional, the vaguely vindictive, and the patently absurd.”

There was no better example of this when D presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke recently outlined his proposal to tax religious institutions that don’t approve of same sex marriage.

O’Rourke is the one who interpreted his failed Senate campaign as a steppingstone to the presidency, including foul-mouthed language on the campaign trail – in that way, much like Trump.

“This,” according to Washington Post writer Michael Gerson, “is not the normal substance of presidential ambitions. Few young people nursing political dreams say: “When I grow up, I want to be a foul-mouthed, overreaching, anti-religious culmination of every exaggerated liberal stereotype and the embodiment of every fevered conservative nightmare.”

Some responsible Democrat, Gerson adds, needs to sit O’Rourke down and tell him it is not worth winning the Democrat nomination in ways that guarantee a re–election landslide for Trump. And that it is not worth losing the Democrat nomination in ways that badly hurt the eventual Democrat nominee.

More from Gerson: “The loyalty and enthusiasm of Trump’s base of support in the GOP — especially among white evangelicals — are ensured by apocalyptic fears. The election of a Democrat president, the story goes, would end America as we know it and usher in an era of anti-Christian persecution. By this logic, many conservative Christians view Trump as a thug who fights in their favor.”

I hope that Trump’s recent stupidity regarding Syria, leaving the Kurds to fend for themselves and freeing ISIS for more tyranny, will prompt Trumpians, finally, to reflect on their often unthinking support.

If not, it should, even as many Republicans in Congress are leaving Trump alone, if only on the Syria cave-in.