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.

My bio which starts off this blog notes one of my jobs in the past – serving as press secretary for an Oregon congressman in his Washington, D.C. office.

It was a privilege to do so.

His name was Les AuCoin, a Democrat, who cut his political teeth in the Oregon Legislature, then moved on to Congress from Oregon’s 1^st Congressional District.

Today, he is retired and lives most of the time in Montana.

All of this came back to mind this week as I read remarks AuCoin made at an event at Pacific University where he graduated.  The occasion was the ceremony to create the AuCoin Archive at the school, as well as the start of the AuCoin Lecture Series.

Here are a few excerpts of what AuCoin said:         

“Sixty-two years ago, I arrived on this campus to do something no one in my family had ever done — I signed in for a college education!  I was the skinny 18-year-old son of a single mom — a waitress in Redmond, Oregon, who had only an 8th-grade education, but big dreams for me.  I was the first male in my extended family to have even finished high school!

“If anyone had told me then I’d be standing here now, doing this, they might have been accused of smoking something a lot stronger than tobacco! 

“So, maybe you can understand why for a guy like me, a day like this could go to my head! Except … that isn’t going to happen! Because I know that the history Pacific University has archived is not mine alone! It’s a 25-year record of idealism and action created by an entire community—especially my staff, family, and friends.

In a reference to his staff:  “These remarkable people embody a virtue as old as the American idea … the belief that governments are instituted to protect the rights of the otherwise unprotected and to be faithful at all times to the first principle of democracy— ‘Consent of the Governed,’ an ideal that has lately come under assault.

“We’re living in fraught times.  Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, wrote something years ago that describes part of our present difficulty. ‘The ideal pawn for a dictator,’ she said, ‘is not those who are committed to an ideology, but rather people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and between true and false…no longer exists.’

“Let’s each of us respond to our times by pushing forward our hopes and ideals, and never giving up, regardless of the difficulty. With so much on the line, let us not become ‘summer soldiers’ or ‘sunshine patriots.’  Let us be what Ulysses spoke of in the epic poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 

               
“Here’s my favorite stanza.  Someday, I hope it is said of me: 

“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but still strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find … and not to yield.”

My own memories of my time working for AuCoin remain strong today.  For one thing, on the staff, I joined a college classmate, Gary Conkling, who was AuCoin’s chief of staff in D.C. and who later joined me as a partner in our lobbying and public relations firm, Conkling Fiskum & McCormick.

And, the McCormick?  He was – and is – Pat McCormick, who ran AuCoin’s Oregon office and became, for me, a life-long friend, a relationship we cemented when we both worked for our company.

Good times?  Yes.

But, also as AuCoin said very well above, it was a time when government stood for something positive.  Not perfect.  But positive.

Nor was AuCoin perfect.  He was just…positive.  The word service meant something to him – and I hope it did for me, as well.  It was my pleasure to deal with the media on behalf of AuCoin, both editors and reporters  in Washington, D.C., as well as those back home in Oregon.

AuCoin properly cites differences between his days in Congress (and mine, by extension) and what goes on in politics today.  The positive character of government back then is a far cry from the depths to which political activity has sunk today.