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.

One of the departments I run with a free hand to manage as I see fit is The Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering.  It is open again today.

And, if you read what follows, you may note that all the good quotes today come from the Wall Street Journal.  Well, that is because it was as far as I got this morning — the Washington Post and the New York Times are next.

The Good Quotes Department is one of five I run:  The others are the Department of Pet Peeves, the Department of “Just Saying,” the Department of Inquiring Minds Want to Know, and the Department of Words Matter.

So, on to good quotes.

FROM DANIEL HENNINGER WHO WRITES THE WONDER LAND COLUMN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:  “Surveying the record of his three years in office, President Joe Biden has decided his re-election turns on two events:  The Capitol riot of 2021 and Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse the 2020 presidential election results in several states.

“Anyone else out there as tired as I am of hearing the phrase ‘our democracy’?

“From all the recent quavering about threats to ‘our democracy,’ you’d think we were living in Venezuela or Zimbabwe.  Yet Biden stood Saturday near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, invoking George Washington to argue that Trump is on the brink of overturning an American democratic order that has survived since 1789.

“’We’re living in an era,’ Biden said, ‘where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.’

“The word ‘democracy’ appears in Biden’s speech almost as many times as its more than 40 nearby references to Trump.

“’He’s willing,’ says Biden, ‘to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.’ The sitting president raised the specter of an American democracy that ‘falls.’

COMMENT:  I run contrary to Henninger, who believes that American democracy is strong enough to tolerate Trump.  No.  I believe that Trump, if he gains the presidency a second time, will turn the country on its head.  He admires dictators and wants to be done, even if, for example, that means pardoning all those now in prison for their actions on January 6, and pardoning himself if he can get away with that now-illegal action.

So, for Trump, democracy is just a word, not a commitment to save it for America.

FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:  “Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard might seem like a ripe moment for introspection at America’s institutions of higher learning.  Alas, they seem to be circling the progressive wagons instead.

“Public figures these days, no matter their race, are too often targets of invective and lies.  Yet, Gay brushed past the substantive criticism of her leadership and failure to punish anti-semitism on campus.  So did her bosses at the Harvard Corporation, which issued a statement lauding her ‘insight, decisiveness, and empathy.’  Jewish students at Harvard might disagree.

“Gay was correct in one respect:  ‘The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader.’  Her equivocation before Congress about whether calling for genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct made her a symbol of the progressive group-think infecting higher education and American institutions more broadly.”

COMMENT:  I think the Wall Street Journal is right when it says:  “This might seem like a ripe moment for introspection at America’s institutions of higher learning.  Alas, they seem to be circling the progressive wagons instead.”

The ability to inspect itself in just such issues as “diversity, equity and inclusion” and plagiarism ought to be a skill in higher education.  So far, it does not appear to be so as higher ed sets out to be insular, not open.

FROM COLUMNIST PEGGY NOONAN IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:  Under this headline and sub-head – “The Voters Finally Get Their Say:  Each party seems set to make a big mistake, but a Trump-Biden rematch isn’t yet inevitable,” Noonan writes this”

“Finally, we vote.  Iowa is Monday, New Hampshire a week from Tuesday. I refuse to see the story as over.  Nothing is written.  Both big parties look set on making a mistake, but there’s time to turn it around.

“Democrats on the ground are making a mistake in not rebelling against the inevitability of Joe Biden.  He’s no longer up to the job, the vice president never was, and this doesn’t go under the heading National Security Secret Number 379; everybody knows.

“The problem isn’t the Biden campaign, however lame it may or may not be.  It isn’t that the president’s most important advisers are in the White House, not the campaign.  It’s him, and it’s not only his age.

“His speeches are boring, he never seems sincere, he seems propped up.  He doesn’t have a tropism toward intellectual content and likes things airy; his subject matter isn’t life as most people are experiencing it, but something many steps removed.  He often seems like he just met the text.

“Democrats on the ground should raise a ruckus, issue a mighty roar. They can do better than this. To win, I think, they must.

“Republicans similarly shouldn’t accept the inevitability of Donald Trump.  On the debate stage Wednesday Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis were the Bickersons, and seemed smaller.  On Fox, in a counter-programming coup, the former president was Big Daddy with a sinister side, and seemed big.  He’s riding high.  He thinks he’s got this thing.

“Trump will say anything for attention; he wants the cameras on him.

“Haley is a steely, orderly lady, DeSantis a bull, Trump a malign screaming meemie.” 

COMMENT:  As is often the case, I agree with Noonan.  She has a way with words in her own style, which tends to be conversational, not over-the-top rhetoric. 

This time, she is right on two counts:  First, as voters, we need better options thaneither Biden or Trump; second, what we’ll see this week is Americans voting for the first time, which is better than more to’ing and fro’ing among commentators – yes, even Noonan, and no doubt she’d agree.