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.

Here I go again.  Postulating notions when I know something, but not everything. 

But, I guess, that’s the nature of writing a blog…such as this one.

Today, I submit that this is a good time not to be a high-level public official such as a governor.

Navigating the shoals of the Covid vaccine emergency is as tough as anything for governors in the West –- from Jay Inslee in Washington, to Kate Brown in Oregon, to Gavin Newsom in California.  Not to mention other governors around the country.

I feel for these public officials, not because I agree with them all the time – I don’t — but because I recognize the almost impossible nature of their task.

If I were in their shoes, I would take action that would probably get me recalled, such as is happening now to Newsom in California.

Given the national Covid emergency related to the delta variant, I would mandate that everyone – yes, everyone – get the vaccine.

To me, the rationale for doing so strikes me as a bit like a mandate to buy automobile insurance.  If you do, you’re protected, as are those who might be involved in an accident with you.  If you don’t, you pay a price.

I recognize this analogy may not be exactly apt, for what we are dealing with in Covid are often life or death situations.  The same could be said about auto insurance, I suppose, but, with Covid, life or death is always at stake.

For context on this subject, know that up-to-date data from Johns Hopkins University indicates that the U.S. reports a seven-day average of more than 108,600 new cases per day as of Sunday, up 36 per cent from a week earlier,

Would it be legal to impose a mandate?  Who knows, and the statutory context would vary state-by-state. 

A legal scholar from American University says yes in an article from National Public Radio”

“In Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a Supreme Court case from 1905 the issue was about a vaccine mandate

“In the early 1900s, smallpox outbreaks were fairly frequent and many people had been vaccinated earlier as children, but needed to be vaccinatedas their immunity waned.  The State of Massachusetts passed a law that gave authority to local boards of health to make a decision at any given moment in response to an outbreak that smallpox vaccination should be mandatory for all residents of their local area if — in the opinion of the medical experts who were serving on the board — it was necessary to protect the public’s health.

“The city of Cambridge made that determination.  It then went through the effort of outreach to get everyone vaccinated.  When it came to Henning Jacobson, he objected.  He argued that vaccines are ineffective.  He argued that they don’t prevent transmission.  And he argued that they were harmful.

“The court described those arguments as not seeking a medical exemption, but rather reciting the alternative views that differ from medical consensus and that those arguments did not warrant an exemption from the requirement to be vaccinated.”

So, then, in the case of smallpox, the mandate was legal.

Things, of course, are different today in a society inundated by social media fabrications, but the solid rationale is that a mandate would be designed to preserve health and avoid what is happening now, which is that those who refuse the vaccine are flexing their selfish muscles at the expense of everyone else.

Often today, right-wing politics rules in the form of protests.  Many citizens are more disposed these days than in past years to question government and, in the extreme, to refuse to follow orders.  Call it what it is – selfishness.

Consider these developments from around the country:

• Get the vaccine or get fired?  In Shenandoah Valley, some nurses choose termination. One nurse put it this way:  “This is the hill to die on.”  If she gets Covid, perhaps she will.
• State workers in Oregon are demanding to bargain over Governor Brown’s vaccination mandate, believing that union bargaining trumps all else.
• More than a dozen large U.S. corporations, including Walmart, Google, Tyson Foods, and United Airlines, have recently announced vaccine mandates for some or all of their workers.
• In California, protests in Los Angeles turned violent after the City Council voted to require proof of vaccination for anyone entering an indoor public space.  In a separate incident in Northern California, school officials banned a parent who, upset over seeing his daughter in a mask, allegedly left a teacher bloodied and bruised on the first day of classes at an elementary school.
• But, overall, support for vaccine mandates is high in California, according to a new CBS-YouGov poll, in which 69 per cent of respondents said they supported vaccine mandates for health-care workers and 61 per cent said they support mandates for indoor businesses.
• Florida, due mostly to the actions of a stupid governor, Ron DeSantis, is earning its reputation for dumb stuff.  A state law signed in May gives DeSantis the power to invalidate local emergency measures put in place during the pandemic, including mask mandates and limitations on business operations.  It also bans any business or government entity from requiring proof of vaccination.

Given the national health care emergency, including hospitals that have no room for patients, getting a vaccine is the only rational solution.

So, who should impose a mandate?  Government?  Employers?  Both?  Others?   I don’t care.  Just get it done and then go to court and win the legal debate for the good of the country.