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.

I wrote the other day about the real solution to the coronavirus pandemic, which any reasonably smart person would know – that includes me, I attest — is vaccines.

The good news is that several are in various stages of development and the normal time frame for such development – 12-18 months – could be shortened, given the extremity of the world’s circumstance.

Hill.com reported on four major efforts by pharmaceutical companies to move on vaccines around the world, often, but not always, with government help.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) showed up with a story — excerpts below — that provides more information, including background on a tough, but real, issue – who gets vaccines first and how long it might take for vaccines to be available generally.

The WSJ story appeared under this headline:

Coronavirus Vaccine Frontrunners Emerge, Rollouts Weighed

Drug-makers build capacity to make hundreds of millions of doses, while authorities discuss: Who will get it first?

Here are more excerpts.

*********

Governments and drug-makers are weighing how to roll out coronavirus vaccines, including reserving the first batches for health-care workers, as several shots race to early leads.

Of more than 100 vaccines in development globally, at least eight have started testing in humans, including candidates from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. At the same time, pharmaceutical giants like Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca PLC and Sanofi SA are building capacity to make hundreds of millions of doses of their own or their partners’ vaccines.

The efforts are part of a larger rush, including at the White House, to line up funding for accelerated testing and expanded manufacturing capacity, all to make doses available in the U.S. starting as soon as this fall.

Yet, there isn’t a guarantee that any of the most advanced vaccine candidates will prove to work safely on such a short timetable. Some, like vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, are based on relatively new technologies that haven’t been approved previously.

Once a vaccine is proved in clinical testing to work safely, drug makers expect the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would move quickly to permit its use, even if the agency doesn’t have all the evidence it typically collects before granting an approval.

The FDA authorized such an emergency use of the drug remdesivir from Gilead Sciences Inc., for treating hospitalized Covid-19 patients on May 1, days after a study showed it shortened hospital stays.

Several drug makers that have been building up their capabilities to make coronavirus vaccines also have pledged to deliver millions of doses this year. Yet, a fuller supply to vaccinate the general population might not become available until well into 2021, according to company projections and estimates by vaccine experts.

“Ideally we’d want seven or eight billion doses the day after licensure, so we can vaccinate the whole world,” said Walter Orenstein, associate director of Emory University’s vaccine center in Atlanta. “The likelihood is we won’t have enough to vaccinate even the entire U.S. population” when a vaccine first becomes available, he said.

The non-profit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which promotes the equitable allocation of vaccines around the globe, recently agreed to give more than $380 million to Novavax Inc. to help develop a vaccine that would be made in various countries for distribution world-wide.

Groups likely to be at the head of the line for access are front-line health-care workers and first responders, plus essential workers like grocery, pharmacy, food-supply and mass-transit employees, said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who serves on a committee with federal and drug-industry officials that is trying to accelerate coronavirus vaccine development.

Johnson & Johnson expects to have some batches of its vaccine ready by early 2021, which Chief Scientific Officer Paul Stoffels said should be sufficient to vaccinate health-care workers globally. The company expects to eventually make more than a billion doses.

Moderna is expanding its vaccine production capacity, including via a partnership with Swiss contract manufacturer Lonza Ltd., to make tens of millions of doses a month by the end of this year, and eventually as many as one billion doses a year, said Chief Executive Stephane Bancel.

One open question is whether the elderly will benefit from a coronavirus vaccine. Immune systems decline with age, which can reduce vaccines’ effectiveness in older adults.

**********

I say full bore ahead with vaccine development. It is the only way we get back to any sense of normalcy.

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.

It’s often interesting how a well-turned phrase can get to the bottom of an issue without going through all of the detail.

Thus, the one in the headline.

“If President Franklin Delano Roosevelt has taken the Trump approach, this column would be in German.”

The column in question was one written by the Washington Post’s Max Boot and skewers Donald Trump for his strategy – if he actually operates with a strategy – to distract from his huge mistakes by criticizing someone else — everyone else.

As Boot says, if this happened in World War II, we’d be speaking German.  Roosevelt concentrated on winning the war, so the allies did.

The Boot quotes lead the opening again of one of three departments I run – the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering. [The others are the Department of Pet Peeves and the Department of “Just Saying.”]

From Max Boot in the Washington Post: “It remains to be seen whether the ‘very stable genius’ will succeed in distracting the public. He has definitely distracted himself.

“Trump has been distracted recently from managing the pandemic by fixating on Michael Flynn and related matters, ranting in private about the Russia investigation, complaining about James Comey and others in the FBI, and making clear he wanted to talk in the run-up to the election about law enforcement targeting him.

“If FDR had taken Trump’s approach, this column would be in German.”

Comment: Read the last paragraph. Nothing more needs to be said.

From Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler: He and his colleagues explore Trump’s tendency to double down on falsehoods in their forthcoming book, “Donald Trump and His Assault on the Truth.”

“One hallmark of Trump’s dishonesty is that, if he thinks a false or incorrect claim is a winner, he will repeat it constantly, no matter how often it has been proven wrong,” they write. Though “many politicians are embarrassed,” Trump “keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version.”

Comment: So true. Trump’s instinct is to lie all the time, especially if lies reflect great, undeserved credit for him given his narcissistic personality.

From the Washington Post: Like Governor Jared Polis, Gina Raimondo in Rhode Island is accepting the reality that the coronavirus will be with us for some time, and the state needs to focus on protecting the vulnerable while mitigating stress on health-care providers.

“Just because we may re-open the economy with the stay-at-home order doesn’t mean people are going to stop getting sick,” she said recently.

Comment: Raimondo sounds to me like one of the good governors who is trying “to do the right thing,” as tough as that is when there is tension between life and livelihood.

From Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post: “But then, this has been the story from the get-go: Trump minimizing, ignoring and contradicting expert advice as part of his magical thinking that refuses to grapple with reality, especially when reality reflects poorly on him.

“The president sought to obscure major problems by trying to recast them as triumphs. He repeatedly boasted, for instance, that the United States has conducted more tests than any other country, even though the total of 6.75 million is a fraction of the 2 million to 3 million tests per day that many experts say is needed to safely reopen.’

“Where Trump leads, his cult will follow. Trump can rely on his base’s anti-science bent, especially when he drowns out or ignores his own advisers. If he does not pay attention, why should his followers?”

Comment: For the life of me, I cannot understand why so many Americans continue to support Trump who clearly stands as the worst president in U. S. history.

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.

Like many others in this “pandemic era,” I look for good news where I can find it.

It was not hard to do so this morning when I read the Wall Street Journal. There, I found a story on the potential re-start of professional baseball.

The story recounted negotiations between baseball brass and the players’ union.

I am a sometimes baseball fan, not a regular one, so I won’t go into detail on all of the back-and-forth negotiations. But one aspect caught my attention. It was this:

“Under baseball’s proposal, the game would look considerably different—and not just because there would be no fans in the seats. High-fives and spitting potentially would be banned.”

Note the most critical fact: SPITTING WOULD BE BANNED.

See, during the pandemic, I can be impressed with the smallest of often irrelevant details.

But, over the years as I have watched baseball on TV, I could not help by notice a salient fact – almost everyone spits. On occasion, I even was tempted to try over the hours of a game on TV to count the number of times I saw spitting.

Which only confirms, I suspect, the sad state of my mind on some occasions.

Spitting will be no longer if baseball actually re-starts.

I say good news as I look for anything bright in the dull and foreboding pandemic.

 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.

It doesn’t take prescience to know that a vaccine or vaccines will be the key to resolving the coronavirus pandemic.

However, easier to say that achieve we were told by the experts.

They said it usually takes 12 to 18 months, at a minimum, for a new drug to go through all of clinical trials and other tests to assure efficacy.

I was encouraged – we all need potential silver linings in the black clouds of the pandemic these days – when I read a story in hill.com that charted the development of four potential vaccines.

None is proven yet, but pharmaceutical companies believe they are pursuing the right goals. Here are excerpts from the story on four U.S. and European vaccine efforts that have started clinical trials.

Oxford University/AstraZeneca

Some of the highest hopes, and the most ambitious timeline, come from researchers at Oxford University, who are now working alongside British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.

“The aim is to have at least a million doses by about September, once you know the vaccine efficacy results and then move even faster from there,” Oxford professor Adrian Hill told the BBC last month.

The potential vaccine began testing in healthy volunteers in a Phase I clinical trial late last month at five sites in England. Data from that trial could be available this month, and later-stage trials could start by the middle of the year, AstraZeneca said on April 30.

The potential vaccine has had success in preventing coronavirus in rhesus macaque monkeys during a test at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) lab in Montana, The New York Times reported last month. It works by using a weakened version of a different virus known as adenovirus, which causes infections in chimpanzees, to deliver genetic material of part of the coronavirus into the body. The body then would generate an immune response to the section of coronavirus, providing protection.

Moderna/NIH

The Massachusetts biotech company Moderna Inc. is partnering with Anthony Fauci’s team at the National Institutes of Health on another leading vaccine candidate.

Moderna said last week it will begin a Phase II study with 600 people “shortly” and plans to start a Phase III trial with thousands of people by “early summer.”

Stéphane Bancel, the company’s CEO, told CNBC that the process is progressing at an unexpectedly fast clip.

“It has gone faster than my best case scenario back in January,” Bancel said. “When we started this back on Jan. 11, partnering with the team of Dr. Tony Fauci, we were hoping to get in the clinic in the summer.”

Instead, Phase I clinical trials started on March 16, and Phase II trials are about to begin.

He said his employees have been “working long days, working seven days a week since January,” and collaborating closely with the NIH and Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Through a partnership with the Swiss biotech company Lonza, manufacturing of the vaccine could start as early as July, Bancel said, even before trials are complete.\

Still, he acknowledged all that vaccine candidates worldwide “will all be supply constrained for quite some time, meaning we won’t be able to make as many products as will be required to vaccinate everybody on the planet.” He anticipates working with governments to decide how to allocate the first doses, for example to health care workers and first responders.

This potential vaccine works differently than the Oxford one. It uses messenger RNA (mRNA) to deliver the genetic code for part of the coronavirus, which then provokes a response from the body’s immune system, offering protection.\

Pfizer/BioNTech

Pfizer and the German company BioNTech are also working together on a potential vaccine using mRNA.

They are testing four potential vaccines at once, using different formats of mRNA to see which one works best.

The companies last week announced they had begun a Phase I trial with up to 360 people at sites including New York University and the University of Maryland.

Mikael Dolsten, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC that the company expects to produce “millions of doses” by October, with plans for “tens of millions” later this year and “hundreds of millions” in 2021.

“So it’s a very quick plan,” Dolsten said.

Pfizer, a drug manufacturing powerhouse, said it has selected its facilities in Massachusetts, Michigan and Missouri, along with one in Belgium, to be the initial manufacturing centers for the vaccine.

Inovio

The biotech company Inovio is working on a potential vaccine that uses DNA rather than RNA to code part of the coronavirus and produce an immune response.

The company says its DNA vaccines can be produced faster and stored more easily, in addition to being safer than other types. This vaccine would require an added step of a hand-held device to deliver an electrical pulse that helps the vaccine enter human cells.

Inovio announced at the end of April that it had enrolled 40 people in its Phase I study at the University of Pennsylvania and a clinic in Kansas City. Interim results are expected by June and further stages of trials could start this summer, the company said.

“If we are on track, this could be as early as by the end of this year or early next year,” Inovio CEO J. Joseph Kim told The Hill when asked when the first doses of vaccine could be ready for the public.

He said it is “quite a challenge” to be able to scale up manufacturing a “thousandfold” to produce hundreds of millions of doses, and that more funding from the federal government would help.\

“More funding and resources will help us scale up to a larger manufacturing scale,” he said.

Kim acknowledged the skepticism about his company, namely that it has never had a product approved by the FDA.

But the company has shown promising results in other areas like the MERS virus and cervical cancer, Kim argued.

“I think healthy skepticism is always fair,” he said.

Ultimately, the results of the COVID-19 trials will have to show the coronavirus vaccine is effective.

In addition to finding a vaccine or more than one, a critical factor will be how long it takes to produce sufficient quantity, given that the pandemic is not a respecter of persons or borders. It is, in fact, worldwide.

That’s why, beyond what one firm is doing by securing manufacturing centers early, a friend of mine told me yesterday he hopes governments will step up to the plate to provide financing – even in the form of loans – to help companies lease more space and higher more staff to build more and more vaccines.

And, another point from me – if companies make money on the process, 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.

The aspiration in the headline is one I hope comes true.

Palpable racism is another reason why Donald Trump doesn’t deserve to hold the nation’s highest political office and should be shown the door next November.

Former Member of Congress, now media analyst Joe Scarborough, described Trump’s continuing racism in a column in the Washington Post this morning.

”President Trump can’t help himself. The former reality-TV host was warned by White House staff, his campaign team, financial contributors and Republicans on Capitol Hill that his afternoon news conferences were causing political damage. But after a weekend of tweeting out conspiracy theories about former presidents and insults aimed at cable-news pundits, the president was at it again Monday.

“And, true to form, Trump burned himself.

“His coronavirus ‘update’” ended abruptly after he hurled a bigoted remark toward an American journalist who grew up in West Virginia. When CBS News’s Weijia Jiang asked Trump about his misleading testing comments, the president blurted out: “You should ask China.”

“Jiang’s family emigrated from China when she was two. For what it’s worth, Trump’s own mother immigrated to the United States when she was 18, and his wife, Melania, gained an “Einstein Visa,” reserved for those of “extraordinary ability,” in 2001. After Trump’s snarling China comment, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed Trump until he abruptly retreated from the presidential podium.”

Typical Trump.

He can’t stand the heat so he gets out of the kitchen. More to the point, he conducts what could be called a “continuing campaign of distraction.”

When opposition mounts, he distracts by inciting controversy.

He did so again last weekend by issuing an astonishing number of tweets – more than 100. All of them trashed persons he didn’t like, who asked hard questions, or had not supported him. Incendiary language. Exactly his intention. Washington Post writer Michael Gerson labeled it “a tweet storm.”

As Trump stumbled away from his press conference, Scarborough reported that he couldn’t help but be reminded of Trump’s racist 2016 attacks aimed at Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel. The then-candidate, Trump, said he couldn’t trust Curiel because he was “Mexican.” But Curiel is an Indiana native; his parents immigrated there from Mexico before he was born.

More Scarborough: “Four years later, Trump’s Republican Party has become numbed to its party leader’s daily outrages — the racist attacks, the 18,000 lies (and counting), the petty insults, the breaches of constitutional norms, and the gross incompetence that has worsened the covid-19 crisis in the United States and has driven America to the edge of a depression. These GOP politicians have long believed that ignoring Trump’s unfitness for office is their best political play…”

With Scarborough, I ask, what will it take for Republicans to stand up to Trump, including his every deranged tweet, every racist remark, his failure to execute the responsibilities of his office. Perhaps polling showing Trump could lose will prompt some Republicans, finally, to stand up for character, not Trump swill.

If they rise to the occasion and oppose Trump, they may be able to look themselves in the mirror.

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.

I use the headline to indicate that, in this age of coronavirus, I have become proficient in new technologies.

Well, not proficient.

Just call me the assistant chief technology officer at my household.

The chief is my good wife. With her help, I have been able lately to use such virtual meeting venues as Go-To-Meeting, Skype, and Zoom.

If you cannot meet in person, then meet on-line.

Examples:

1. I used Go-To-Meeting yesterday to join a number of colleagues on the Oregon Golf Association Board of Directors Executive Committee for our regular meeting.

Spread around the state, we were able to communicate as if we were together in one room. We dealt with issues about keeping golf going in Oregon during the pandemic, which has been and will be a feat of new engineering and creativity.

2. I will be using Skype this Friday to participate on-line in a meeting of the State of Oregon Ethics Commission.

Normally, we meet in a Salem conference room. This time, we will be on-line and the meeting, by law a public one, also will be available for any citizen who wants to tune in.

3. Each Friday at 8 a.m. I tune in via Zoom to a Bible study for members of Illahe Hills Golf Club who want to do more than golf together.

The user-friendly Zoom allows us to be together from our own living rooms.

Regarding Zoom, Fortune magazine reports that the virus outbreak has supercharged demand for the video-chat service. Zoom won’t disclose usage numbers beyond its last reported quarter, but CEO Eric Yuan said on March 4 that the company has seen a “large increase in the number of free users, meeting minutes, and new video cases” – beyond such older systems as Skype and Go-To-Meeting.

So, I am not alone in using on-line meeting devices in the pandemic. But my experience has been and will be that programs represent a valuable way to stay connected in one of the most difficult times in our country’s history.

A footnote here is that my niece, Zan Fiskum – a musical talent considerable proportions (meaning that got none of her ability from my side of the family — has been competing on the NBC program, The Voice. In the last few weeks competition has occurred on-line. Several months ago, she was in Los Angeles in the studio, but with the pandemic, she and other contestants have been singing from their homes around the country.

Celebrity judges also have been in their homes and both the contestants and the judges have had to learn to put together the technology to be on line. It was feat of significant propositions.

Go Zan!

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 world of politics sometimes gives us new words, which, by continued use, become part of our lexicon.

One of them, at least for me, is the word “gaslighting.”

I didn’t know what it meant, so, using Google, I opened the dictionary. Here’s the definition:

“Manipulate someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.”

This issue arose for me when I read a piece by Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent, which appeared under this headline:

TRUMP’S LATEST EFFORT TO GASLIGHT AMERICA IS FALLING APART

Sargent went on:

“The news that the novel coronavirus has invaded President Trump’s inner circle — and that the White House is implementing aggressive testing and tracing to combat it — is a devastating story on an obvious and immediate level, but also on a deeper and longer-lasting one.

“Most palpably, it has revealed the sort of glaring double standard that’s catnip to political media: The White House is taking extensive steps to protect Trump and his top advisers with resources that are largely unavailable to the rest of us, in part due to his own dereliction.”

So, Sargent asks how Trump will persuade the country to return to something approximating normal economic activity when his own advisers are panicked about their health.

According to CNN, Trump’s advisers grasp that this story has become a deadly problem for them. But note why they have concluded this:

“An official said there is extreme sensitivity inside the White House at the current state of affairs with officials recognizing the contradiction in telling states to reopen while the White House enhances protocols to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.”

This story reflects, Sargent writes, “a larger illusion Trump is trying to weave with his magical reality-bending powers — that the coronavirus has been so tamed by his stupendous leadership that it’s now safe to reopen the country, setting the stage for an equally spectacular Trump-marshaled comeback.”

Last weekend, Trump unleashed a frantic barrage of messaging – more than 100 tweets, if you can call tweets “messaging” — that everything is going spectacularly well. Trump claimed it’s “great to see our country starting to open again and hailed his own “great” handling of the pandemic (nearly 80,000 dead).

Trump’s stupidity is, Axios reports, “an epic gaslighting campaign.”

“The next step will be for Trump to begin questioning the death totals, something he’s already done privately and so, could become a “full death denier.”

Stories in this morning’s editions of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post reported that new polls show that Trump’s re-election is anything but a foregone conclusion, if only because many Americans are coming to the conclusion that Trump has no idea what he’s doing as president, other than catering to his narcissism.

So, I say, don’t let Trump gaslighting succeed.

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.

Various polls show that Donald Trump may not win re-election which, for me, would be a welcome result.

But two other factors are in play. The first is that, in political terms, it is an eternity until the election next November. There is no way to predict what could happen in seven months.

The second factor is that Trump may have a few advantages heading into the election despite his inadequate – not to mention unfailingly stupid — attempts to manage the coronavirus pandemic.

Gerald Seib, who writes the Capital Journal column for the Wall Street Journal, pointed out four potential Trump advantages in a piece published yesterday. Here they are, with, in each case, comments from me:

• “Trump can portray himself as the president best able to lead an economic recovery.”

Seib adds that “One prominent Democrat strategist frets privately: I worry that voters will think we need a businessperson to get out of the country’s financial mess.”

Comment: I say that, even if that were true – we need a businessperson – Trump would not be it. His business experience, like his tenure in the presidency, rests on a house of cards.

• “Some persuadable voters may be more disposed to Trump than commonly imagined.”

To make this point, Seib cites poll results that give Trump almost no margin for error as he tries to prompt voters to choose him. Many of these so-called “persuadable voters” are soft Republicans, Independents, young men and people who approve somewhat of Trump’s job performance, despite his abject failures.

So, Seib says they could end up voting for Trump.

Comment: I hope not. Make a better choice for America.

• “Trump knows how to win an unpopularity contest.”

Seib says that one of the secrets to Trump’s success is that “people don’t have to like him to vote for him.”

Comment: True enough. Last time around, when Trump won he had to go against Hillary Clinton, she even had more negatives that he did. This time, he will be competing against Joe Biden and his negatives will be no where near Clinton’s.

• “The Trump campaign has a cash advantage.”

While money isn’t everything in politics, it helps.

Comment: I continue to hope that character trumps (pardon the words) cash.

Seib is a solid writer and political analyst, no doubt smarter than me. But, I find his list of Trump advantages a bit strained at times, perhaps because I want Trump to lose the office he shouldn’t have won in the first place.

I will continue hoping that Trump is not able to capitalize on whatever strengths he supposedly has so we can have an occupant of the Oval Office who displays solid leadership credentials in a very though time in American history.

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 in this blog captures the impossible choice all of us – both governments and individuals – face these days in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

It is not an exaggeration to label it as a choice between “life and livelihood.”

It also is not an exaggeration to label it as impossible. Impossible in the sense that there is no definitive right answer.

That’s why I tend to give many forthright government individuals a bit of room to make and announce their decisions.

I say “forthright government officials,” a phrase that excludes Donald Trump, the make-believe president who cannot see past his own nose as he faces a major challenge to his presidency.

If I were to be cast in a role to help make the “live and livelihood decision” for Oregon, I’d come down on the side of preserving life.

But I’d also know that it’s not that simple. I’d also reckon with the fact that “preserving life” also means preserving the way to earn a livelihood because, if that’s gone, there will be huge health and mental health ravages.

Here is the way columnist Peggy Noonan put it in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

“But the economic contraction will have repercussions as destructive as the virus itself. People will die and sicken because of lost jobs, lost income and a feeling of no opportunity, no possibility.

“Alcoholism, drug abuse, anxiety, suicide, strife within families—all these things will follow. And there’s a feeling of terrible generational injustice. My generation is on pause, but the young are on stall, and it’s no good for them. People need to operate in the world to become themselves.”

The New York Times painted the challenge this way, putting the issue in individual, not just collective, terms:

“As states begin to loosen restrictions, the act of re-opening will be carried out, not by governors or the president, but the millions of individuals being asked to do it.

“When Maine finally announced this week that hair salons could reopen, a stylist in Lewiston, stayed up late wondering what to do, feeling overwhelmed.

“The virus still scared her. It seemed too soon to open up. Then again, her bills had not stopped and her unemployment benefits had not started, and she was starting to worry about next month’s rent.

“Around midnight on Thursday, she finally drifted off. But she woke an hour later, and did not sleep much after that.

“’It’s an extremely hard decision for all of us,’ she said. ‘I want to go back to work. I want to have the money. I want to see people. But it’s hard because I’m worried about the virus coming back around. I can’t get my mind off it. It’s very stressful.’”

The director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment called the decision navigating “a really tricky balance between trying to continue to keep the disease transmission at a level at which it won’t overwhelm our hospital systems and allow people to still try and earn a living.”

The fact is that sometimes hyper-partisan wrangling between Trump and governors over whether to re-open has obscured the way many Americans are thinking about the issue. We are not always neatly divided into two political tribes, with Republicans wanting to see restrictions lifted and Democrats wanting to remain shut down. Even within each of us there can be conflicting instincts.

There are, for me.

In her column, Noonan says, “People need hope. Americans live on it. We must return to life. That is where the bias must be.”

She adds: “…we must unleash the creativity of businessmen and businesswomen, an uncalled-on brigade, in this battle. Not only doctors and scientists will get us out of this, business must be on the lines, too.

“…we also have to cooperate by doing the things that contain the illness so that businesses can stay open and functioning. A mask isn’t a sign of submission as some idiots claim. It’s a sign of respect, responsibility and economic encouragement. It says, ‘I’ll do my small part.’”

As usual, Noonan is trenchant.

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.

Note: This is a piece I originally wrote for an Oregon Common Cause Ethics Committee on which I sit – see below. I have revised the piece to fit this blog. I post it now, even though the importance of our work over the last year has been dented a bit by the understandable occupation with the coronavirus pandemic. Still, keeping a focus on ethical behavior and conduct is critical if government in this country is to survive.

Remember Watergate?

Well, those of us who lived through the scandal, now more than 50 years old, recall that it brought down the Nixon Administration. Those who may not have lived through it no doubt have heard about unethical dealings, dirty tricks and crimes.

If you want to understand just a bit about Watergate, watch the old film, All the President’s Men, as I did a few weeks ago. It will tell you all you need to know about a terrible chapter in U.S. history.

However, if there is good news about Watergate, it is that reaction to the crimes and excesses of the scandal ushered in almost 40 years of commitment to ethical behavior and conduct in and about government, both on the part of elected officials and the public at large.

Elected and appointed officials recognized the importance of honesty and ethics. The public expected it.

But, now, in the last 10 years, ethics has receded from public consciousness.

“The current ethics program, at least at the federal level, was developed in response to Watergate,” recalls Walter Shaub, the retired director of the Federal Ethics Office. “The system worked well for 40 years. There was room for improvement, but, for the most part, the system worked well as a preventive mechanism. The flaw was that it was completely dependent on the president’s administration to comply and set an example. The current administration has signaled that it does not want the system to work.” current federal ethics program was developed in response to Watergate. The system

In response to such a reality, Oregon Common Cause created a volunteer committee of 10 citizens more than a year ago to meet and propose ways to promote ethical behavior and conduct in public life.

Members of the committee were drawn from the Executive and Judicial Branches in Oregon state government, former state legislators in Oregon, an experienced Oregon college political science expert, and representatives of the business community. In short, a wealth of experience existed on the committee.

One step the committee took was to work with DHM Research, one of Oregon’s most reputable polling firms, to test Oregonian attitudes about ethics and honesty in government.

In one question, respondents were asked how important it was for high-level officials such as presidents, governors and senators to be honest and ethical. The answer – 98 per cent said honesty and ethics was important. That even exceeded a recent PEW Research Report, which put the proportion at 91 per cent.

In another question, DHM asked respondents to rate credentials for high-level public officials. Basic honesty came out on top, but “ability to compromise” also ranked highly. It came in at 83 per cent, again just higher than a PEW report at 78 per cent. That’s important because, for government to work in the way it is supposed to work in a democracy, finding the smart middle ground is critical.

Buoyed by the DHM survey results and after reviewing a wide ethics landscape, the Common Cause Committee decided to focus on two initiatives – (1) creating ethics pledges for public officials and, (2) injecting ethics education in school curricula. It also considered, but did not end up proposing, a major effort to educate voters about the importance of ethics, stopping that only because of the huge financial cost of such a ballot-measure type effort.

The first initiative is to advocate that candidates running for Secretary of State and the Second District Congressional seat sign pledges to commit to ethical behavior and conduct, both in the campaigns and, for the two who win, in office.

The pledge focuses on basic principles of honesty, fairness, responsibility and respect, emphasizing, for example, that opponents are valid participants in elections regardless of who wins. Such a construct would be far different than what happens in many election races these days.

Based on experience in these two races, the goal is to expand the range of elected officials who would be asked to sign such pledges, both for campaigns and in office.

“The good news here,” says state government veteran Mike Marsh, chair of the Common Cause Committee, “is that, if officials sign the pledges, they can be measured on how well they live up to them. That would increase the value of ethics in public life.”

As for appointed officials, Marsh said he and colleagues will be working with the governor and other high-level officials in Oregon to advocate enacting the ethics pledges for “executive and management service” employees, as well as those appointed to state boards and commissions. Together, that would amount to hundreds of officials who would commit to ethical behavior by signing the pledges.

For appointed officials, the idea of a pledge builds on what is already in Oregon law — ethics rules and regulations governed by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, which is being consulted about the renewed ethics emphasis in Oregon.

“Ethics pledges,” Marsh adds, “are used by a number of major Oregon private companies that have a commitment to ethics and honesty in how they operate every day. This includes Intel which assigned an executive to work with us on the committee and which asks its executives to sign ethics pledges every year.”

The second initiative relates to re-emphasizing ethics issues in the social studies and civics curricula school districts have in place for high school students.

The committee has worked closely with two districts – the Bend-LaPine School District in Central Oregon and the Salem-Keizer School District in the Willamette Valley – to help officials draft appropriate additions to current curricula. Those two districts have been open to the ethics emphasis and curriculum experts are meeting now to translate proposals into usable form for the classroom.

The goal is to develop models that could work in other districts around Oregon.

Overall, there are few issues as important as building – or re-building – trust in government.

PEW Research reports that “76 per cent of Americans believe trust in the federal government has declined in the past 20 years and, when asked why, more than one third cite something related to how the U.S. government is performing – whether it is doing too much, too little, the wrong things or nothing at all – including how money has corrupted it, how corporations and unions control it, and general references to ‘the swamp.’”

It’s time for all Americans to reverse the “we don’t trust government” trend. All of us should be able to expect, if not demand, a high-level of ethical and honest behavior on the part of those who serve in government.

And, as citizens, we should practice ethical behavior ourselves as we relate to government and as we live in our neighborhoods. If we recognize a high ethical bar for ourselves, it would make what we expect of government more credible.