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 Peggy Noonan knows what she’s talking about – actually writing about — when she calls for change in the Grand Old Party so it can survive, if not thrive.

She was a long-time Republican.  Note the word “was.”

In a telling phrase, she writes:  “I was a political conservative but not a Republican.”  So, she left the party, as many did in response, at least in part, to Donald Trump’s excesses.

Today’s Republican Party, Noonan says, is in dire need of repair.  And, as an advocate of the two-party system, she hopes the GOP will find a way to be successful.

“No one likes the Republican Party,” she generalizes.  “Pretty much every power center in America is arrayed against it — the media, the academy, the entertainment culture, what remains of our high culture, the corporate suite, the non-profit world.

“The young aren’t drawn to it.

“The party is split, if not shattered.  The opposition has a new presidency, almost a Senate majority, the House, albeit by a hair.  The president nearing his hundred-day mark and deeply committed to showing energy in the Executive Branch, has yet to make masses of voters crazy with rage.  His approval numbers are steady.”

“What would constitute an active civic and political good in America in 2021,” Noonan asks.  “Helping to bring that party back.  It is worth saving, even from itself,” she answers.

“At its best, it has functioned as a friend and protector of liberty, property, speech and religious rights, an encourager of a just and expansive civic life, a defender of the law, without which we are nothing, and the order it brings, so that regular people can feel as protected on the streets as kings.

“At its best, it has been Main Street, not Wall Street, a stay on the hand of government when it demands too much. At its worst, it’s been — worse!  But let’s dwell on the good, which can function as a guide in rebuilding.”

“Some Republicans the past few years have talked of breaking from the two-party system and starting a third.  But that’s not the way to go.  Better to strengthen the system that for more than a century and a half has seen us through a lot of mess.

“In its rough way, the two-party system, even without meaning to, functions as a unifying force:  At the end of the day, for all our differences and arguments, you have to decide if you were a constituency of Team A or Team B.

“The parties, in their rough and inadequate way, had to be alive to your interests.  Things proceeded with a sense, an air, of majority rule.

“Two parties are better for the country, and better for the Democrats. A strong Republican party keeps them on their toes.  One side should stop the other when it goes too far, or boost it when it fails to move.”

But, Noonan adds, the GOP can’t just “keep existing only to own the libs, manipulate the distracted, monetize grievance, and plot revenge against those who spent the past few years on the wrong side.

“As Oscar Hammerstein once said, liberals need conservatives to hold them back and conservatives need liberals to pull them forward.”

Good quote.

My wife, smart person that she is, wishes for a viable third party that would represent her interests, which trend neither right nor left, but hew toward the center.

At the moment, neither party compels her allegiance, nor mine.  And that allegiance would not occur until one existing party or the other appeals to centrists.