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.

The other day, as he signed off as a full-time journalist after 29 years at the Wall Street Journal, Gerald Seib offered a prescription for better government.

I found his ideas to constitute solid advice.

Here is what he suggested:

• An outbreak of political courage.  Specifically, the country needs the emergence of more lawmakers from both parties who are willing to risk their jobs by reaching out to the other side, and to take steps that displease the most extreme elements of their own base.  Such leaders are in depressingly short supply.

• Actual steps to revive the political center, starting with dramatic actions to curtail gerrymandering.  Both parties have taken brazen actions at the state level to redraw congressional districts into uncompetitive sinecures, thereby empowering those on the ideological wings.

• A bi-partisan agreement on the rules for casting and counting votes, taking election integrity off the table as a divisive issue.  Both sides are wholly dependent on confidence in the system that brought them to office. If, as seems likely, power in Washington is to be shared by the two parties after this fall’s mid-term elections, they will have an equal stake in the soundness of the system, and the moment to end this corrosive argument could be at hand.

• A decision by voters across the spectrum to reward rather than punish responsible behavior and compromise.  Voters aren’t powerless; politicians respond to the signals they send.

As an aside here, I was sorry to see that Oregon Congressman Kurt Schrader lost his seat in the recent election.  Apparently, he was not liberal enough for voters – or at least for his opponent.  As a centrist, Schrader functioned like a member of Congress should – he didn’t follow order from anyone as he made up his mind.  He will be missed in Congress.

Regarding my initial blog commending Seib’s advice, one of my good friends read what I originally wrote and wondered if Republicans weren’t more at fault than Democrats for attempting to use election processes to achieve desired results – results even different voter preferences.

Point made. 

This friend may be right, especially if you look at the last major election when then-President Donald Trump and ilk among Republicans tried to overturn voter preferences.

And, they are still at it, though a piece of good news is that Trump failed in Georgia where the governor he opposed and the Secretary of State he opposed both won.

With all due respect to my friend – and I mean respect in a genuine way – I prefer to call on both sides, both Republicans and Democrats, to display more reason and courage in elected office.  There is room for improvement on both sides and it is not an exaggeration to say that our form of democracy is literally at stake.

We need elected officials to strive to find the center, even as they express their views from the right or the left.  Such should be the definition of politics.  Arguing for points-of-view, then trying hard to negotiate toward agreement.

It was John F. Kennedy who said something like this:  “We should not work to find the Republican or Democrat answer.  We should work to find the right answer.  We should not to try to find blame for the past.  We should work to identify the best future.”

That doesn’t sound like politics today, does it?

As a solution, or at least a partial one because there are no magic answers, we should try Seib’s prescription and hope for the cure to what ails us.