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.

Election politics often revolves around finding scapegoats to blame for whatever bugs a certain candidate.

Today, look no farther than Democrats who have found a new one – corporations which can be blamed for almost everything.

Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, makes this point in a column that ran this morning.

“With Halloween in the air,” Henninger writes, “it’s the right moment to discuss the central role played in presidential politics by bogeymen—creatures conjured to distract and scare the citizenry. In politics, the bogeyman is always just around the corner. For John F. Kennedy it was ‘the missile gap;’ for Barack Obama, the ‘wealthiest;’ and for Donald Trump, criminals pouring across ‘the border.’

“Naturally, the Democrats running for their party’s presidential nomination needed a bogeyman, and they have created one even scarier than the Trump monster. It’s them—‘corporations!’ At their recent presidential debate, one candidate after another claimed corporations were wrecking the country.”

Henninger writes that Senator Elizabeth Warren, “who knows a thing or two about scaring people,” said this: “They (corporations) have no loyalty to America. They have no loyalty to American workers. They have no loyalty to American consumers. They have no loyalty to American communities. They are loyal only to their own bottom line.”

Politics can get crude. It is possible to understand, if you lose judgment in the quest to win at all costs, why candidates play the race card, the class-warfare card, the anti-immigrant car or any other card.

But, I ask, with Henninger, how has the Democrat Party arrived at playing the anti-corporation card?

First, not all corporations are evil. A number of them make huge mistakes, which generate national headlines. Look no farther than Boeing.

But the anti-corporation rant comes against a growing economy that is producing historically high job creation and rising wages for people regardless of income level, race, sex or sexual orientation.  Corporations provide jobs for thousands of Americans.

The New York Times wrote recently that the jobs boom was forcing corporations to dig deeper for workers: “With the national unemployment rate now flirting with a 50-year low,” the Times “noted that companies are offering work-from-home options to parents, accommodating employees with disabilities, reducing educational requirements and waiving criminal background checks.”

In his Wall Street Journal column, Henninger posits that Democrat presidential candidates aren’t talking about the real economy “because most of them don’t understand it.” They give no credit to private sector job-creating efforts even as they advocate for more and bigger government.

The same negative view of corporations appears to be under way in Oregon.

In the Secretary of State race, for instance, one candidate is pinning the campaign on limiting corporate political contributions without one mention of political contributions from public employee unions. The latter, of course, fuel Democrat campaigns, so the question to win for a Democrat argues against any mention of the extent of union contributions even as corporate contributions are described as evil.

As I watch politics these days – both in Oregon and Washington, D.C. – I wish those running would appeal to our best interests as Americans. Avoid finding bogeymen — immigrants, those with certain sexual orientations, those with different economic status.

Advocate for the public interest. Find middle ground solutions.

And, to put a point on it for this post, don’t go after corporations, unless they deserve the scrutiny. Recognize that many of them contribute to economic gains and hire workers – and it is those very workers who pay taxes, thus funding government programs important to all, including Democrats.