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 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.

There are a host of ways to describe the presidencies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

I have used many descriptions to deride Trump and commend Biden.

Here is the way Washington Post writer E. J. Dionne made the point in a recent column:

“Whatever else they were doing, the voters who put Biden into the presidency in 2020 were seeking something closer to a functional, normal democracy.  

“This was the opposite of what we had when Trump rampaged around the White House, obsessed only with himself, his image, and the attention-grabbing havoc he could wreak.

“That normality means Biden does not grab the headlines, particularly on cable news and social media, the way Trump still can.

“No one who runs for president lacks ego, but Biden is a fundamentally decent man who has spent his life thinking about what legislation he could pass, which problems he might start solving, and how he could tilt the economic playing field a bit more toward the kinds of people he grew up with in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.”

Excellent point.

Biden may not win re-election if he actually runs again and, clearly, he is not perfect as the U.S. political leader.  But he deserves consideration, not for achieving all he or the left wants, but for behaving in a decent way.

That’s more than we’ll ever get with Trump, who, as Dionne writes, is “obsessed only with himself, his image and the attention-grabbing havoc he could wreak.”

Further, consider this by writer Tom Nichols as it appeared in the most recent on-line edition of The Atlantic Magazine.  Under the headline, “A Deepening Void,” Nichols used telling words to describe Trump.  And, intentionally, I quote it at length because what Nichols writes details the coming “civil war” in America due substantially to Trump.  Or, perhaps a certain kind of civil war is already is here.

From Nichols:

“Civil war is among the many terms we now use too easily.  The American Civil War was a bloodbath driven by the inevitable confrontation between the Union and the organized forces of sedition and slavery.  But at least the Civil War was about something.  

“Compared with the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life, the arguments between the North and the South look like a deep treatise on government.

“The United States now faces a different kind of violence, from people who believe in nothing—or at least, in nothing real.  We do not risk the creation of organized armies and militias in Virginia or Louisiana or Alabama marching on federal institutions.  Instead, all of us face random threats and unpredictable dangers from people among us who spend too much time watching television and plunging down internet rabbit holes.

“These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio — or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021.

“There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom,’ but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives.

“These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause; they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots.

“What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it.  When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything.  Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger, but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them.

“Donald Trump is central to this fraying of public sanity, because he has done one thing for such people that no one else could do:  He has made their lives interesting.  He has made them feel important.  He has taken their itching frustrations about the unfairness of life and created a morality play around them, and cast himself as the central character.

“Trump, to his supporters, is the avenging angel who is going to lay waste to the ‘elites, the smarty-pantses and do-gooders, the godless and the smug, the satisfied and the comfortable.’”

And, then, this from Norm Ornstein, an author and political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute:

“…oaths mean little to Trump.  Fealty to the law meant nothing to him.  The country’s interests meant nothing to him.  The only oath he has taken is to his own greed and self-preservation.”