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.

An incident in a pro golf tournament last week underlined an important general question facing this country:  What drives resistance to vaccines?

No one knows the answer for sure, but pro golfer Jon Rahm got a dose of reality last week.

After the third round of the Memorial Golf Tournament in Ohio, Rahm got the bad news.  He had tested positive for the virus.  And, thus, he had to withdraw from the tournament. 

Trouble was he had a six-shot lead and could have gone on to win a tournament the pros love because it pays homage to the best golfer ever to have the played the game, Jack Nicklaus.  [Yes, the rating of “best” in the previous sentence is mine, and there are those who will debate the ranking.]

Back to question.  Why hadn’t Rahm just gotten the vaccine to preserve his playing privileges?

I don’t know and I suppose there might have been some kind of reason for his failure.

But, to go beyond golf, resistance to the vaccine is a national issue.

In the Wall Street Journal, William Galston wrote about the issue in a column that appeared under this headline:

Eight in 10 Democrats have at least one dose, compared with about half of Republicans.

His column started this way:

“As public concern about the pandemic continues to decline, the Biden Administration is pushing hard to meet its goal of vaccinating 70 per cent of adults with at least one shot by the Fourth of July.  More than 60 per cent of the country is already vaccinated.

“Still, reaching that goal will be challenging. Monthly surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation show that about 20 per cent of the population was staunchly opposed to getting vaccinated at the beginning of the year and remains so today.  As the share of Americans who say they are in “wait and see” mode has declined to only 12 per cent from 31 per cent in January, the pool of new possibilities has shrunk.  Mass-inoculation centers are being phased out in favor of a strategy bringing shots to trusted messengers—such as the new campaign to organize 1,000 barbershops in black neighborhoods.”

Galston suggests that the principal remaining obstacle to near-universal vaccination is the large number of Republicans who are declining to participate.

“The partisan gap is astonishing,” he writes.  “More than 80 per cent of Democrats have already received at least one shot, compared with 49 per cent of Republicans.  Twenty-seven per cent of Republicans say that they won’t get vaccinated under any circumstances, and an additional 9 per cent will do so only if required.  The comparable figures for Democrats are 3 per cent outright refusal.”

The vaccination breach is one more illustrattion of deep divides that endanger the American political system.

Galston argues that there are three reasons for vaccine resistance.

• First, many Republicans are visceral if not doctrinal libertarians. They understand freedom as being left alone to make their own choices, and they resent being told what to do.  They implicitly reject distinctions between actions that affect only themselves and those that affect others.  From their perspective, mask mandates restrict freedom, whatever their purported social justification, and so does pressure to get vaccinated.
• Second, an increasing number of Republicans are populists who bristle at what they see as elite condescension toward ordinary citizens.  When medical experts assure us that Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective, many Republicans wonder how they can be so sure about medicines that were developed so quickly.
• Third, for more than a century, white evangelical Protestants have had a tense relationship with modern science, which they see as challenging core tenets of their faith. They are less likely than other Americans to take “follow the science” as their benchmark.

I disagree, at least in part with point #3 above, I would write the sentence this way — “SOME white evangelical Protestants have had a tense relationship with modern science.”  There is a tendency among writers like Galston is to merge “white evangelical Protestants” into one supposedly collegial group. 

No.  White evangelical Protestants cannot be lumped into one group.  For many, like me, are not ones who have “a tense relationship with modern science,” just as many of us abhor Donald Trump for all the damage he did to our country.

Back to the point about vaccine resistance. 

It is time for Jon Rahm and others like him to get vaccinated to protect themselves – and us.