Perspective from the 19^th 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.

I borrowed the headline on this blog from a column that ran a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal (WSG).

It was written by long-time Republican political strategist Karl Rove, now, among other pursuits, a WSJ columnist.

His piece did a very good job of this:  Putting to rest notions, which I have heard from several persons, that things are worse today than they ever have been.

Rove says “no” and then describes the reality.

Some of those who love to talk about how bad things are today hue to Donald Trump who is running for president on a “U.S. is terrible” platform, as is his vice president candidate, J.D. Vance.

It’s as if Trump is saying “things are bad today and only I, Donald Trump, can make them better if you make me king again.”

His denigration of America appears to have taken hold of some persons in this country, though I hope the “some persons” refers to those who already support Trump.

Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, has a far sunnier disposition as she asks Americans to work hard to correct problems in what she calls “the greatest country in the world.”

Still, by citing excerpts of Rove’s column below, I am not saying that things are going swimmingly in America.  No.

We have real problems – immigration, tax policy, international relations in the face of wars, and many others – but we need solid officials on all sides of the political ledger to help solve them.

We don’t need naysayers.

So, here are excerpts from what Rove wrote:

• This is the subhead that led Rove’s column:  “U.S. politics today is ugly and broken, true enough. But the good news is that it was worse in the past, and it will get better again.”
• America is deeply divided.  Our politics is broken, marked by anger, contempt, and distrust.  We must acknowledge that reality but not lose historical perspective.  It’s bad now, but it’s been worse before — and not only during the Civil War.
• Let’s look backward and start with the mid-1960s to early ’70s.  The nation was bitterly divided over civil rights, the “sexual revolution,” and an increasingly unpopular war in Southeast Asia.
• The just and peaceful civil-rights protests of the 1950s and early ’60s were often met with state-sanctioned violence.  Then Harlem exploded in 1964, followed by a riot in Philadelphia.  Watts went up in flames in 1965; Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco the next year.
• On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.  Riots broke out in more than 130 American cities, with 47 killed in the ensuing violence.  Two months later Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
• That same year the nation’s most prominent segregationist, George Wallace, running for president as an independent, won five states in the Deep South.  In 1972, he came in third for the Democrat nomination, 1.8 points behind the winner in total primary vote.
• Beginning in 1965, the country was rocked by demonstrations over the Vietnam War, many of them student-led.  In some instances, governors sent in the National Guard to restore order.  After guardsmen killed four students in 1970 at Ohio’s Kent State, protests broke out on 350 campuses, involving an estimated two million people. Thirty-five thousand antiwar protesters assaulted the Pentagon in October 1967.
• An estimated 10,000 protestors tried shutting down the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago.  Four years later, thousands tried the same at the GOP convention in Miami Beach.  The U.S. experienced more than 2,500 domestic bombings in 18 months in 1971-72.
• Two presidents were driven from office during this period.  Lyndon B. Johnson opted against seeking re-election in 1968 because of the war.  Richard Nixon, facing impeachment over Watergate, resigned in 1974.
• In the early 1930s, 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed.  Populism emerged on both ends of the spectrum.  On the left, Huey Long, proclaimed “every man a king,” threatened confiscation of wealth, and preached class hatred until he was assassinated in 1935.
• The Gilded Age is often overlooked as a time of division, but Republicans and Democrats hated each other. They were still fighting the Civil War by political means.  President Ulysses S. Grant’s 1872 re-election was followed by five consecutive presidential contests in which no winner received a popular-vote majority.  
• The most notorious of these Gilded Age elections was 1876.  Democrat Samuel Tilden led Republican Rutherford Hayes by 252,666 votes nationwide, but disputes about the Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina results were settled on March 2, 1877, by a special commission that awarded their electoral votes to Hayes. He was inaugurated two days later and, in return for a meaningless pledge by the South to protect black rights, he withdrew the remaining federal troops from the region.  The Electoral College count was 185-184.
• In the Gilded Age, it was routine for the House majority of either party to phony up a challenge to a member of the opposition who’d won by a few votes and toss him out, no matter how flimsy the evidence.  This happened 62 times between 1874 and 1904.  After winning re-election in 1882 by eight votes, Representative William McKinley of Ohio was expelled by the Democrat majority.
• There were bitter divisions and acrimony in the 1850s.  Remember the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks in 1856?  It was condemned in the North and cheered in the South.
• Historian Joanne Freeman writes in “Field of Blood” that this violent period in the Capitol began in the 1830s and lasted for decades.  Senators and representatives routinely carried pistols, knives, clubs, brass knuckles, and other weapons onto the floor.  Political tensions ran high; insults and confrontations were routine and violence frequent. There was even death. In 1838, Whig Representative William Graves of Kentucky shot and killed Democrat Representative Jonathan Cilley of Maine in a duel over charges of corruption.
• These decades of animus followed America’s first claim of a stolen presidential election.  Andrew Jackson led in 1824’s four-way race with 41 per cent of the popular vote and carried 11 states, but with 99 electoral votes came up 33 short of a majority.  The contest went to the House, with each state’s delegation having one vote.

So, Rove asks, what ended these periods of broken politics?  

He answers:

“Convulsive events such as World War II played a role.  More important, adroit leadership — the kind we saw with Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan — clearly mattered.  They set a tone that led to healing.”

But most of the credit, Rove continues, “goes to the American people, who make mistakes but have always found their way back to true north.  They have often tolerated our country’s politics being angry, hyper-partisan and divisive; in some instances, they are the driving force behind polarization, with the political class reflecting the public’s unchecked passions.

“But that lasts only for a season. Their good common sense eventually brings them to vote for change, determined to reshape our politics in healthier, more constructive ways.”

And, Rove concludes:

“Polls show a clear majority of voters are unhappy with today’s politics and its ugly practices.  But don’t grow weary or discouraged.  It’s bad today, but it’s been worse before, and it will be better ahead.  Change is coming.  We don’t know precisely when, but it’s coming.  The better angels of our nature as Americans will emerge and win out.”

For my part, I hope Rove is right – that “better angels” will emerge. 

But what his column drives home to me is this:  Things may seem askew today, but they have been bad before, so it helps to maintain, (a) a sense of perspective, plus (b) a commitment to do each person’s part – my part — to contribute to improvement.

That commitment to personal action is one plank in Democrat Kamala Harris’ platform as she runs for president with a sunny disposition and a sense of joy.

I will take that over Trump’s darkness.  I hope other Americans will do the same.