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.

I may have written about this before, but I am doing so again because it has been fun to think about some of my favorite sayings.

Plus, I don’t have much else to do as my wife and I prepare to leave the California desert and head back to our home in Salem, Oregon.

The sayings relate to two of my worlds – golf and lobbying.  Golf as a fun sport.  Lobbying as my job for many years.

So, here they are, perhaps not memorable to everybody, but memorable to me:

• That’s the first step down a slippery slope [This is a phrase I used frequently as I tried to kill a bad piece of legislation.]

• That’s the camel’s nose under the tent  [Same with this one in the lobby game.]

• They acted like a circular firing squad  [And, this, too, explains how various legislators didn’t have an idea of what they were doing, so they compromised each other.]

• Ready, fire, aim  [Ditto.]

• What goes around comes around  [This was a favorite phrase used by one of the best co-chairs of the Joint Ways and Means Committee at the Capitol in Salem; what he meant was that it usually was best to understand that one incident on the way to an agreement on legislative issues – pro or con — didn’t amount to the whole story.]

• It was all hat and no cattle [A sometimes popular phrase in the lobbying business to refer to a legislator who had an idea, but not much to back it up.]

• If he would have swung harder, it would have gone farther  [This phrase relates to golf and, in fact, it is not often true, as golf requires a combination of strength and finesse.]

• He has a lot of green to work with  [If you watch much golf on television, you’ll hear this phrase uttered frequently by commentators.  That’s a job I would love – saying this phrase over and over.]

• Better than most  [Golf commentator Gary Koch made a name for himself when he said this about a putt made by Tiger Woods when it would have been better if had said “better than anyone else”…for that was true on the 17^th island green at TPC Sawgrass in Florida.]

• I pay Callaway to play Callaway golf clubs — and Callaway pays Phil Mickelson to do so   [It’s true, though Mickelson may be in the process of losing his endorsement with Callaway, given his revolt to LIV.]

• Jack Nicklaus, Dustin Johnson and I all hit fades off the tee  [This is also true.]

• I taught my son all I know about golf, then he turned five-years-old  [This simply is a way to say that my son is better than me at golf – and it’s a fact I love.]

• Let’s play today “for the love of the game,” not for money [Which I say to some friends who tend to believe that exchanging money always makes golf more fun.]

• I quit golf today, but I I’ll start again tomorrow  [This describes my pro and con love for the game of golf.]