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 answer to the question in the headline?

Watergate!

That name of a residence building in Washington, D.C. became a household word as all of us watched and learned about what the word meant:  A case of a government gone amuck – at least part of the government, the Republicans under their leader, Richard Nixon.

I remember a lot about Watergate, but the term did not confine itself to a specific day.  We remember where we were on the day the first Americans landed on the moon, or the day President John F. Kennedy was shot.

Watergate lasted for months.

Over the months, we watched a presidential Administration implode, in part because of tenacious journalism practiced by such artists as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal carried a solid editorial on the anniversary of Watergate.  It is worth reading, so I repeat it below.  And, I say worth reading for its implications for the current misdeeds – even alleged crimes – of another of the worst presidents in U.S. history, Donald Trump.

He deserves Nixon’s fate, which, in this case, would mean he would not be allowed to run for president again.

So, read on.

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Fifty years ago Friday, burglars broke into the Watergate complex — and the rest is more than just history.  The scandal that ended in President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation from office helped shape our modern politics, reforming the government, revitalizing the press, and redefining the parties.  Now, the country confronts another generation-defining crisis, and events half a century old feel as relevant as if they happened yesterday.

The Nixon White House’s illegal sabotage of its opponents and the coverup that followed were examples of government going wrong.  What happened after these crimes showed government going almost exactly right:  Congress investigated, the news media reported, the people read, watched, listened, and spoke — and eventually, enough members of the Republican elite put country over party to lead to the departure of a corrupt, dangerous president.

Today, Congress is investigating again:  A select committee in the House of Representatives is examining what happened on January 6, 2021, when an armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn the results of a lawful election — in part because a president, Donald Trump, exhorted them to.

Yet, most members of the GOP appear afraid to utter a word against the ex-president, who continues to hold their party in his grip.  Worse still, most refuse to engage at all in this truth-seeking effort, or even to put much stock in the concept of truth itself.  Not only do the two sides today share little when it comes to policy or philosophy.  In many cases, they don’t even share a reality.

So in 2022, as Congress tries to get to the facts when facts have gone out of fashion, is there anything to be learned from 1972?  Scandals happened in the decades before, from the Red Scare, to the Bay of Pigs invasion, to the misguided decisions that mired the nation in the Vietnam War; scandals happened in the years after, from the Iran-contra affair, to the claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to the mental and physical torment of prisoners during the war on terrorism.  All surely contributed to the erosion of trust in government to its depressing low of 20-some per cent today.

Yet Watergate shook the nation as little else before and changed it — in some ways for better, by encouraging the press to hold government to account and the public to pay attention, as well as by ushering in legislation that served the same goals in areas such as campaign finance and intelligence, and in some ways for worse, by planting the seed of anti-government sentiment that has since grown like a strangling weed.

January 6 has shaken the nation, too.  The environment for needed change — whether updates to the Electoral Count Act and safeguards for voting rights, or a broader attempt by both parties to reconcile over common causes such as democracy and the rule of law — looks, admittedly, hostile. But enough people — from those in the chambers of Congress to those in any spot in the country near a television set or a newsroom desk — cared 50 years ago to make government work again when it appeared to have broken.

The worst mistake anyone can make today is to give up on it because it has broken again.