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.

This stands as a footnote to a blog I posed earlier this morning, one calling, again, for finding a way in this country’s politics to land in the middle where the best public policy solutions lie.

I could have added that, over the weekend, we lost a man who knew how to find the smart middle in Congress.  So I add it now.

U.S. Senator Bob Dole who ran for president a couple times, but never made it.  But he did serve 25 years in Congress where he was an architect of getting good things done.

Here is the way Washington Post columnist George Will described Dole in a column that appeared this morning:

“…few congressional careers loom large.  This is because legislative accomplishments are collaborative, the result of blurry compromises presented in pastels rather than sharp pictures painted in bold strokes of primary colors.  Dole’s legislative life was the political life as Plutarch described it:

“They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life. It is the life of a domesticated political and social creature who is born with a love for public life, with a desire for honor, with a feeling for his fellows.”

That was Bob Dole.  He survived terrible wounds in war to serve with distinction in Congress.

A former partner of, Kerry Tymchuck, worked previously for Dole as his speechwriter and now serves as executive director of the Oregon Historical Society.  He remembers Dole fondly and told the Oregonian newspaper about it when he said this:

“He was an institutionalist who believed in making Congress work and getting things done.”

We need more Bob Doles these days.