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.

I wrote about this earlier in the week, contending that President Joe Biden – and any other president – should stick to a script, especially when dealing with complicated and dangerous foreign policy issues.

Too much is at stake to allow full, ad-libbed candor in U.S. foreign policy.

Biden’s off-the-cuff comment that Russian president Vladimir Putin would have to go was not a statement of U.S. foreign policy, though it was understood by some in the world to be so.

Wall Street Journal columnist William Galston added this perspective:

“The journalist Michael Kinsley famously proposed that ‘a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.’

“By this standard, the ad-libbed final sentence of Biden’s Warsaw speech may be a gaffe for the ages.  Administration officials scurried to walk back the suggestion that regime change in Russia was among the objectives of U.S. assistance to Ukraine.  

“America’s NATO ambassador, Julianne Smith, suggested (plausibly enough) that Biden’s words represented ‘a principled human reaction” to his encounter earlier in the day with hundreds of desperate Ukrainian refugees.”

Biden’s impromptu remark, Galston added, “dominated coverage of an otherwise strong speech.  It raised a larger question:  Is it conceivable that the rest of the world can return to business as usual with Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president, or must he and his country be treated as international pariahs so long as he remains in power?”

No one knows the answer yet.  I surely don’t.  But it could be that the world, if it wants peace, could answer “yes.”  It’s time to Putin to go given the way he has acted recently, without regard to human life, evoking, for me, the spirit of Adolph Hitler.

But, in the end, I continue to hope that Biden uses his vast foreign policy experience to lead well, even as he sets out to stay on-script.