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.

E. J. Dionne is not one of my favorite columnists for the Washington Post – he is usually too far left for me, as I label myself a “centrist.” But this week Dionne made a thought-provoking point in one of his columns.

President Donald Trump not only benefits from division and dissension, he tries to provoke it. It is the way he hopes to win in 2020.

Here are a few more paragraphs from Dionne’s column:

“We often hear that both sides of politics benefit equally from polarization. This is plainly untrue.

“Say what you will about President Trump, but he knows there’s only one way he can prevail. He needs to keep the nation deeply divided — by race, immigration status and religion, and by region, culture and ideology.

“Trump’s rants seem — and often are — irrational, undisciplined and self-indulgent. But they are also shrewd and ­purposeful.

“He accepts that he has permanently lost large parts of the country. But, given our electoral college, he knows he doesn’t have to win a plurality of the popular vote. He needs only tiny margins in swing states, and these require overwhelming support from whites, Christians, older Americans and people in small cities and rural areas.

“He needs them to believe that he’s their champion and that his enemies — liberals and ‘socialists,’ big-city folk and the ‘politically correct,’ the secular and the culturally adventurous — hate them. If keeping that level of hostility high requires direct and indirect appeals to racism and xenophobia, he’s good with that.”

So, polarization and division are hallmarks of Trump.

For those on the other side of Trump – I decline to call them “progressives,” as Dionne does, for that title gives them more benefit than I think they deserve – division doesn’t work.

For now, let’s call them Democrats. They win only with coalitions that cross the lines of race, place and faith. Democrat candidates need strong support and turnout from African Americans, Latinos and city dwellers. But they cannot prevail in swing states without help from blue-collar and non-college-educated whites.

“Moreover,” writes Dionne, “the left and center-left believe that public action is a positive good, that social solidarity is a realistic possibility, and that a society thrives when it shares benefits and burdens equitably. When we live in our bunkers of hatred, none of these dispositions has a chance.”

“Rural and small town voters don’t think either party is going to do anything for them, but they vote Republican because they think Democrats will do something to them: Take their guns or raise their taxes, or enact an environmental law that will put them out of work.”

Borrowing from a speech by Senator Sherrod Brown, a possible one—time candidate for president, Dionne quotes these stunning words from a speech the late Senator Ted Kennedy gave to the City Club of Cleveland during his 1968 presidential campaign, the day after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated:

“When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother,” Kennedy said, “when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens, but as enemies — to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.”

This is the politics of Trump. Spur hate and invective. Use that to invigorate supporters to vote for you again.

With Dionne I say, even as we face the prospect of impeachment at home and war with Iran overseas, “We cannot let things go on this way.”