Perspective from the 19th Hole 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.
It’s hard to read news articles these days without seeing more information about whether President Joe Biden should run again or not.
Every day, it seems more political figures among Democrats are saying “he shouldn’t run again,” even as he vows strongly to stay in the race come what may.
Still, in the midst of all this, I appreciated the chance to read a new column by New York Times writer Frank Bruni. He asked a good question as he pondered the fact of voting for president this time around:
- One is a convicted felon who doesn’t respect the rule of law who won’t step back for the good of the country.
- The other is a doddering old man who won’t depart the race for the good of the country.
Bruni saves his most vehement ardor for the felon, Donald Trump. His column appeared under this headline: “Impeachments, bankruptcies, fraud judgments, felonies. Nothing sticks.”
Here is how Bruni started his column:
“We tell children — or at least we used to — that actions have consequences. What goes around comes around. Watch your behavior. You’ll answer for it someday.
“Donald Trump is the living, lying contradiction of that.
“He answers for nothing. He’s accountable to no one.
“You thought that changed with a Manhattan jury’s verdict five weeks ago? With ‘guilty’ on all 34 counts? How adorable. That only bound most of his supporters even closer to him. Only amplified the theatrical ardor with which Republican politicians pledged their devotion. Only increased donations to his presidential campaign.”
While voters turned down Trump the last time around, he simply pretended it hadn’t happened. Remember, he won the last election and asked his supporters to spread violence to make his convoluted and dishonest case.
More from Bruni:
“Trump invented dark conspiracies and embroidered wild fantasies to turn defeat — by seven million votes, no less — into supposed victory. Into full-blown martyrdom. He cried ‘rigged,’ he cried stolen,’ he stood by as a mob stormed the Capitol and stood mute as it chanted for his vice president to be hanged.
“For that ethical savagery the members of his political party lined up dutifully behind him once again. David Koresh never knew loyalty like this.” [Remember Koresh? He was the fake prophet who led others to defeat at the Waco Compound.]
Of Trump, Bruni says he has made a career of evasion.
“No, he has made a legend of it. And while there’s a kind of smarts and a sort of skill in that, it owes more to luck than to brilliance. It owes the most to the perverse freedom that comes with a total lack of conscience — with the readiness to stoke people’s darkest fears and cruelest impulses, to shrug at the damage done, to bilk charities, to run a sham university, to tell little lies, to tell big ones, to place self-promotion and self-preservation so far above everything else that they’re not so much his guiding values as his only ones.”
Bruni worries that Trump will win the election, especially as Biden continues to falter. So do I.
If Trump wins, the America we know could very well disappear.
Perspective from the 19th Hole 