This is the first of two blogs on the subject of “expertise.”

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.

Of all things, a philosophy teacher from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania produced solid advice for the wise this morning.

In the Washington Post, the teacher, Crispin Sartwell, wrote a piece that appeared under this headline:

Nothing can relieve you of the burden of deciding what to believe.

He’s right.

In today’s political system that values disagreement over consensus, it is hard to know what to believe about society, especially during a pandemic. And, whom do you trust among the “experts.”

Sartwell goes on:

“The media have noticed that experts disagree. A strange unity of confusion is emerging.  A common inability to decipher conflicting advice and clashing guidelines coming from government, science, health, media and other institutions.  On seemingly every front in the battle against the coronavirus, the messages are muddled: mTest or don’t test? Which test? When?  Isolate or not?  For five days?  Ten?  Go to school or not?  See friends and resume normal life, or hunker down again?”

Yet, for many people, deferring to the experts appears central to value systems and political identities and is emphasized relentlessly by the Biden Administration and certain members of the media.

More from Sartwell:

“It is bewildering to receive changing and conflicting information from experts.  But it also shows some things about our fundamental situation as creatures that have to believe and act without omniscience.  Nothing, not even the experts, can relieve you of the burden of deciding what to believe. Even if all you want to do is believe whatever the experts say, that is itself a decision.  Then you’ve got to decide who is an expert and which experts to believe.”

For my part, at least when it comes to politics, I make my own decisions after reading several newspapers every day – and I do so as a former journalist who values both good writing and solid opinions, not to mention newspapers in general.

From the center-left, I read the Washington Post.  From the center-right, I read the Wall Street Journal.  Then, along with discussions with my smart wife, I try to land somewhere.

Nowhere was so-called “expert” advice more confusing than over the last couple days as President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnel spared over voting rights issues in this country.

Here are excerpts of what Biden said in Georgia:

“You know, for the right to vote and to have that vote counted is democracy’s threshold liberty.  Without it, nothing is possible, but with it, anything is possible.

“But while the denial of fair and free elections is un-democratic, it is not unprecedented.

“Black Americans were denied full citizenship and voting rights until 1965.  Women were denied the right to vote until just 100 years ago.  The United States Supreme Court, in recent years, has weakened the Voting Rights Act.  And now the defeated former president and his supporters use the Big Lie about the 2020 election to fuel torrent and torment and anti-voting laws — new laws designed to suppress your vote, to subvert our elections.

“Here in Georgia, for years, you’ve done the hard work of democracy: Registering voters, educating voters, getting voters to the polls.  You’ve built a broad coalition of voters:  Black, white, Latino, Asian American, urban, suburban, rural, working class, and middle class. 

“And it’s worked:  You’ve changed the state by bringing more people, legally, to the polls.  You did it — you did it the right way, the democratic way.

“And what’s been the reaction of Republicans in Georgia?  Choose the wrong way, the un-democratic way.  To them, too many people voting in a democracy is a problem.  So they’re putting up obstacles.”

Well, Biden sounded logical and forthright, as well as conscious of history.

But not to McConnell.

In just a few hours, he took to the floor of the Senate to deliver what Washington Post columnist Peggy Noonan called a “stinging rebuke, indignant to the point of seething.  He didn’t attempt to scale any rhetorical heights.  The plainness of his language was ferocious.

“Biden’s speech, McConnell said, “was profoundly unpresidential, deliberately divisive, and designed to pull our country further apart.  I have known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years.  I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday.

“Biden had entered office calling on Americans to stop the shouting and lower the temperature. Yesterday, he called millions of Americans his domestic ‘enemies.’ That, a week after he gave a January 6th lecture about not stoking political violence.”

I could add more to what both Biden and McConnell said in their war of words, but I will demur.  So, whom do you believe?

I don’t know.  What would be required is a detailed analysis, word-by-word, of the new Georgia law to make an independent judgement between accuracy and rhetoric.

For my part, I might engage in that kind of research, but have not done so yet, so I am still in the process of deciding my own views between the “experts.”

And, to underline an overriding concern, it’s only one examples these days of political point/counter point amidst the reality that disagreement is not the goal, not one part of reaching a consensus.