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.

The Wall Street Journal showed up the other day with a column I imagine was designed to impress someone like me – a person who loves words.

Better than charts, graphs, or numbers.  Even photos.  Give me words and I’ll be satisfied.

The Journal’s word:  “Still.” 

Columnist Carlos Lozada said President Joseph Biden uses the word all the time to send an important message:  The United States still has the potential to outlive the bad news of one Donald Trump.

Here, according to Lozada, is the bottom line of the Biden message: 

“This is a Biden line — a single word, really — that also stands out, and it comes up whenever this president reflects on that American soul, on what the country is and what it might become.  It is still.”

More from Lozada:

“Presidents are forever linked to their most memorable lines or slogans, phrases that become inseparable from their passage through history.  Ronald Reagan proclaimed morning in America.  Barack Obama promised America hope and change.  Donald Trump pledged to make America great again.

“Our leaders also utter words they might rather take back — say, about lip-reading (George Herbert Walker Bush) or the meaning of “is” (Bill Clinton) — but their go-to lines can capture their message, signal their attitude, and even portray their worldview.”

Biden, Lozada writes, has long settled on his preferred pitch.  

“We are living through a battle for the soul of this nation,” he wrote in 2017, after the darkness of Charlottesville.

“Biden highlighted the battle for that soul again in his 2020 and 2024 campaign announcements and has revisited it in multiple speeches.  It is ominous and a bit vague — John Anzalone, Biden’s 2020 pollster, complained during that race that no one knows what ‘soul of America’ means and that the line ‘doesn’t move the needle.’”  

But it does provide the rationale for Biden’s candidacy and presidency.  Under Trump, Biden contends, America was becoming something other than itself.

Examples of Biden’s use of the word “still:”

• “We have to show the world America is still a beacon of light,” Biden wrote in a post-Charlottesville essay.
• “We have to prove democracy still works — that our government still works, and we can deliver for our people,” he said in a speech to a joint session of Congress in April 2021.
• “We are still an America that believes in honesty and decency and respect for others, patriotism, liberty, justice for all, hope, possibilities,” the president said in a speech in September at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where he asserted that the foundations of the Republic were under assault by MAGA forces. “We are still, at our core, a democracy.”

There is an implicit assumption in Biden’s use of the word “still.”  It is his belief that many Americans no longer believe in the nation’s professed virtues or trust that they will last much longer, and that we must be persuaded of either their value or their endurance.

These are the persons – the disaffected and irritated – who are the exact political stratum to which Trump appeals.

Lozada:  “To say that America is a democracy is to issue a statement of belief.  To say that we are still a democracy is to engage in an argument, to acknowledge — and push back against — mounting concerns to the contrary.”

The contrast between Biden saying America is still a democracy and Trump vowing to make it great again is more than a quirk of speechwriting, Lozada contends.

“What presidents say — especially what they grow comfortable repeating — can reveal their underlying beliefs and basic impulses, shaping their administrations in ways that are concrete, not just rhetorical.

“Biden’s ‘still’ stresses durability; Trump’s ‘again’ revels in discontinuity. ‘Still’ is about holding on to something good that may be slipping away; ‘again’ is about bringing back something better that was wrested away.

“Biden’s use of ‘still’ is both soothing and alarming.  It connotes permanence but warns of fragility.  The message of ‘still’ is that we remain who we are, but that this condition is not immutable, that America as Biden envisions it exists somewhere between reality and possibility. 

“‘If we do our duty in 2022 and beyond,’ Biden said ahead of the mid-term elections last year, ‘then ages still to come will say we — all of us here — we kept the faith.  We preserved democracy.  We heeded not our worst instincts but our better angels.  And we proved that for all its imperfections, America is still the beacon to the world.”

So, in all of this, I am “still” in Biden’s camp.  I will never support Trump “again.”