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 (Les AuCoin), 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 could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Columnist George Will achieves two objectives in what he wrote this morning in the Washington Post:

• He advocates the point in the headline in this blog – cancel the remaining presidential debates because they serve no useful purpose for the country.
• More than any columnist writing today, Will has the ability to string good words together to make solid points.

On the latter, consider only this example from the lead to Will’s column:

“The putrescence of America’s public life was pitilessly displayed Tuesday when, for 98 minutes whatever remains of the nation’s domestic confidence and international stature shriveled like a brittle autumn leaf.”

Note the word “putrescence.”  Not one most of us would find a way to use every day.  The definition of the word is just this:  Putrid matter.

That’s what the debate was – putrid.

Will goes on:  “Most Donald Trump utterances resemble turbid creeks that are silty at their sources and trickle away into mud. He might finish his presidential term without ever speaking a complete sentence — subject, object, predicate.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, who characterized Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose movement as one of “strenuous vagueness, ”survived Antietam, but might have expired straining to decipher Tuesday’s cascade of falsehoods, rudeness and syntactical tangles.

“Some viewers, their minds already closed concerning their presidential choice, watched the debate the way some people watch stock-car races:  In hopeful expectation of carnage.  They were not disappointed.”

So, with Will, I advocate the two remaining debates be scrapped.  It will not be possible to change debate rules for at least two reasons:  First, Donald Trump will not abide by the rules, even of he agrees to them in advance; and, second, all he will do is interrupt and lie his way through 90 minutes.

Some say turn off the microphones when there are interruptions.  Imagine what would happen next – Trump would simply yell and scream without amplification.

Beyond this, how did the world view the first “debate?”

Not well.

According to the New York Daily News:

“The Times of India  — the best-selling English language paper in that 1.35 million person nation — wrote ‘The US embarrassed itself before the world for 100 minutes.’

“That Indian outlet felt Trump controlled the momentum and kept Biden off-balance, but the showdown had no winner.  It wrote the event was marked by ‘angry exchanges and invective, culminating in implicit threats of election-linked racial conflagration by President Donald Trump.’

“The Times of India concluded that ultimately ‘America lost’ on Tuesday.

“Great Britain’s The Guardian agreed the debate was a loss for the U.S. on the whole and called it ‘a bad night for the world.’”

So, let’s avoid losing again.  Scrap the debates and get about the business of voting.