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.

In an earlier blog, I gave the new U.S. House Speaker a pass on his past and complimented him on early comments about working with Democrats in the U.S. House as he took over a job no one appeared to want enough to get it.

Perhaps I commented too early.

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent wrote this:

“Representative Mike Johnson, the newly-elected House Speaker, has repeatedly flirted with what’s known as the ‘great replacement theory,’ the idea that Democrats are scheming to supplant American voters with immigrants.  The Louisiana Republican’s views show how fringe conspiracy theories have gone mainstream in the Republican Party at the highest levels of power.

“’This is the plan of our friends on this side — to turn all the illegals into voters,’ Johnson said at a congressional hearing in May 2022, gesturing at Democrats.  ‘That’s why the border’s open.’”

Sargent continues:

“The ‘open borders’ trope is a lie, and while a few municipalities allow voting for non-citizens in local elections, in no sense do national Democrats have any such ‘plan’ for ‘all the illegals.

“As far as I can determine, no House Speaker in recent memory has been quite as reckless and incendiary with this kind of language.”

Give Sargent his due.  He gets paid to write stuff.

Then, today, Ruth Marcus, also from the Post, added to the context:

“This (Mike Johnson) is not an upgrade (from the more publicly known and controversial Jim Jordan).  It is Jordan in a more palatable package — evidently smoother, seemingly smarter and, therefore, potentially more effective.

“Johnson, now serving his fourth term in Congress, was the moving force behind a Supreme Court brief that helped lay the shoddy intellectual groundwork for January 6, 2021.  In December 2020, he rallied fellow Republican lawmakers to support Texas’s brazen bid to overturn the election results.  

“In a lawsuit that fizzled almost as soon as it was filed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sought to have the Supreme Court intervene in the election by blocking the certification of electoral college votes in four swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — where voting rules had been changed in the course of the election and voters, not coincidentally, had favored Joe Biden.

“The justices swiftly rejected the case, tartly noting that, ‘Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”

So much for what Johnson advocated.

Overall, there is little question but that Johnson, if he is to succeed as speaker, will have to live down what he has said and done in the past. 

Here’s another example cited by the Wall Street Journal:  “He came to Congress with a long legal record battling gay rights, abortion, and limits on religious expression in the public sphere.”

How will that play today?

To be sure, Johnson has said and done a lot of goofy stuff – even reckless stuff, not just goofy.

But, based on what I wrote earlier, I am willing to give Johnson a little wiggle room to live up to his new job. 

In politics, I tend to favor giving a new person in an office time to try to succeed before going after that person or declaring him or her to be a complete loss.

If Johnson can succeed from somewhere in the middle, perhaps tilting right, good – and good for the country.

If he cannot, he will be his own victim.

And, we will become his victims, too, if we really pine for good government.

Footnote/  As former vice president Mike Pence ended his campaign for president this time around, here is how the Wall Street Journal reported the development:

“He has concluded this moment was not his time and appeared to make an implicit appeal against Trump, urging GOP voters to choose a Republican standard-bearer who — in the words of Abraham Lincoln — would ‘appeal to the better angels of our nature, and not only lead us to victory, but lead our nation with civility back to the time-honored principles that have always made America strong and prosperous and free.’”

My view of Pence is that he kowtowed too often to Trump, though some contend that doing just that was his assignment as vice president.  But, I also felt that beneath that Trump-inspired exterior, was a better man – one I didn’t always agree with, but a better man.  His quote is one example.