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.

It doesn’t take a brilliant mind to grasp the reality of this blog headline. 

Thus, my mind qualifies.

If, in government, “public discourse” means the ability to have reasonable discussions about pressing public policy challenges, then we appear to have lost that ability – in Oregon and nationally.

The loss applies to both Republicans and Democrats.

Republicans repudiate all things government, led by the clown, Donald Trump. 

Democrats endorse all things government, led, on one hand, by President Joe Biden, and, on another hand, by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (who strikes me as the Democrat’s answer to Trump).

Wall Street Journal commentator Gerard Baker, retired executive editor of the newspaper, made these points in an on-line column this morning.  [In the spirit of full disclosure, Baker is not my favorite columnist as he writes in retirement.  But, that does not mean that I don’t read – or sometimes agree with – what he writes…which, come to think of it, relates to what appears below, the need for improved discourse.

The sub-head of Baker’s piece:  “Our leaders of both parties now seem free to utter things completely at odds with reality and logic.”

He continued:

“If I had to pick the most worrying characteristic of our current dystopia, I would choose the unsettling disconnect between the seriousness of the challenges we face and the public discourse that is supposed to be addressing them.

“A perilous war rages in Europe, as a failing tyrant with nuclear weapons launches desperate new waves of cannon fodder against a nation whose defense we are financing and reinforcing.  In Asia, the emerging Chinese superpower is in the throes of a significant economic and social upheaval that may propel it toward the full-scale confrontation it increasingly threatens with Taiwan, an island whose people we are pledged to defend.

“At home we are caught in the worst of economic traps — as the Federal Reserve inflicts unavoidable monetary pain to kill the surging inflation incurred by its avoidable mistake.  Meanwhile the global economy seems to be sliding into a potentially serious recession, and financial markets are eroding our wealth at a dizzying pace.”

At a time when Baker says there is a “need for quiet, calm deliberation,” the current conversation sounds “like the game room of a psychiatric institution.”

“This isn’t a partisan point,” Baker adds.  “Both sides are only too eager to point out the mania in the other’s rhetorical obsessions but deny the delusion in their own.  So secure are they in the knowledge that their supporters will stand by whatever they say that our leaders now seem free to utter things completely at odds with reality and logic.”

Current problems in public discourse go well beyond political rhetoric, Baker says.

“Our larger discourse is dominated by cultural authorities who want us to believe things that the human mind rebels against — that there is no such thing as biological sex, that the way to fight past discrimination is with present discrimination, that not punishing crime is the way to prevent crime, that words can mean whatever they tell us they mean.  These are the nostrums of the dominant progressives in our culture, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that conservatives aren’t also susceptible to impossible ideas and implausible theories.”

Further, modern technology has created platforms that elevate extreme voices.  Look only at Trump and his minions or Ocasio-Cortez and her’s.

Baker concludes: 

“It’s inescapable that part of the answer lies in the collapse of the traditional institutions of authority.  The stability of the two-parent family, the primacy of faith and the cohesion of a wider community not only conferred an order on people’s lives but established a larger sovereignty of truth on them.  Loving but firm parental leadership, the eternal verities of religion, the obligations to a wider social unit of shared values imposed a structure of epistemic guardrails.

“It is not that this structure constrained us all to believe the same things, religiously, politically or otherwise, but it established the prior understanding that there is such a thing as a higher truth that mocks propositions and ideas that defy it.”

This is a good summary of what bothers me about the current state of politics.  Lying comes naturally to those in public office, as well as to many voters.

Seemingly, there is no middle ground.  No ability.  Not just to talk, but to LISTEN to what others have to say and consider whether what they say raises questions about your own viewpoint.

That’s what middle ground is – the area where consensus and agreement can occur.

And it appears to be unalterably lost in politics today, a sad commentary.

So, I say to those running for election and to those voting in the election, bring me middle ground!