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.

No, the issue is not abortion, though the good word “roiling” applies to that, too, as the country reacts to the leak of a U.S. Supreme draft opinion scrapping Roe v. Wade.

I prefer not to write about abortion, but I have a chance to play a few holes of golf this week with retired Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul DeMuniz and, along the way, he bemoaned the loss of confidentiality for the top court in the land.

The issue for this blog, though, is college debt and whether to forgive it.

Columnist Matt Bai writes well about the issue in today’s Washington Post in a piece appearing under this headline:

“If Biden wipes out college debt, why work hard and play by the rules?”

Bai remembers a phrase uttered by none other than former President Bill Clinton who rescued a flailing Democrat Party several years ago by saying this:  “Government should reward those who work hard and play by the rules.”

Bai adds:

“If President Biden moves ahead with a sweeping executive order to wipe out college debt, it will mark a final repudiation of that ideal — and another step toward restoring the party to its pre-Clinton futility.

“One of Clinton’s core critiques of the party, which had lost three straight presidential elections, was that it had become known as the party of giveaways.  Democrats wanted to throw government money at every problem, but they asked nothing of people in return, demanded no accountability.”

Work hard, with no rules.

By contrast, Bai says Clinton believed government’s job was to incent work and personal responsibility, rather than penalize it.  From that belief sprang such policies as the vast expansion of the earned-income tax credit and welfare reform.

In terms of college debt, a lot of families made difficult decisions not to accrue such debt.  Parents chose to forgo retirement savings or nicer houses in order to sock money away for college.  Students chose cheaper state schools over private colleges, or they decided to pass on college altogether.

Millions of other graduates who did take out loans worked for years or decades to pay them off, making their own set of painful career and family sacrifices along the way.

Bai asks:

“What are we telling those families, if Democrats declare a one-time debt holiday in time for the fall elections?  That all their hard choices amounted to a sucker’s bet?

“These families followed Clinton’s advice — they worked hard and played by the rules.  Some Democrats would treat them now like fans who sat too far from the T-shirt cannon at a football game.”

Compromises could exist in the back and forth about debt.

Here are some that have struck my wife and I as we talked about the issue this morning:

• What about a proposal that knocked off a modest amount of debt for only the lowest earners and only for undergraduate study?
• What about a proposal to reward borrowers who chose careers in public service, or to expand an Obama Administration program helping those who got scammed by for-profit colleges?
• If a student took a low-paying job in an economically-deprived area on the premise that at least part of their college debt would be forgiven, what about a proposal to restore that incentive, especially if had been jerked away?
• What about a proposal to provide some relief for students, who, with their parents, chose less expensive state schools over high-priced private schools?

Bai’s conclusion: 

“If Biden makes college retroactively free for millions of borrowers, he’ll not only be sticking it to families who surely would have made less responsible choices had they known they’d never have to repay their debt. He’ll also be steering Democrats back to the 1980s, when they were branded as the party of the proverbial free lunch.” So, I urge the Biden Administration to be careful, even if some advocate forgiving debt as a campaign strategy in the upcoming mid-term election.  Find middle ground, which still would be controversial, though it does exi