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.

Kamala Harris, the Democrat candidate for president, has come under scrutiny from the media for having changed some of her positions, including on fracking and a single-payer-system.

In the early excerpts of as prime time interview with CBS, Harris addressed criticism that her positions have shifted significantly on major issues, including climate change and immigration, saying several times, “My values have not changed.”

I find that to be a solid and sincere statement to explain her changes, though she surely will face continuing questions on such subjects as climate change and immigration along the presidential campaign trail.

And, I add quickly that it is not possible to suggest that Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president, changes positions, for he has none in the first place.  So, change is simply not possible.

All Trump does is bluster, saying the first thing that comes into his mind, then allowing the bluster to cross his lips, without any attention paid to honesty or accuracy.

For me, my perceptions on the “changing positions” issue stem mostly from my 25 years as a lobbyist in Oregon where I dealt with members of the State Legislature.

There, I saw lawmakers change positions from to time.

So, I came up with this list of possible reasons for a change.

• Flip-flopping:  This is a negative word meaning that the politician cannot figure out what his or her position is, so they go back and forth without much thinking.

• Learning more than you knew at first:  This is positive.  Lawmakers who are trying to do “the right thing,” often learn something when they get to the Capitol in Salem because, to state the obvious, they do not know everything on the day they arrive.  So, their positions may change.

• Recognizing changing political winds:  This can be both positive and negative.  If a politician simply puts his or her finger to the political winds before deciding what their position or changing their position, then they are just responding to the wind.  But, if they recognize the reality of politics and change positions given a rational look at the winds, then that is positive – or at least can be.

Even so, changing positions can be a negative that comes to roost during an election campaign.

Consider this example that had a lot to do with losing a major election.

It was 2004 and the George W. Bush re-election operation took one equivocation from Democrat challenger John Kerry about an Iraq funding bill — “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it” — and ran Bush’s entire campaign based on it.

“Kerry’s vote itself,” a New York Times writer said, “wasn’t so important as what the Bush campaign convinced people it said about Kerry’s character.

“As the Times described it at the time, ‘Kerry aides dismiss the sentence as the inevitable verbal hiccup that comes when candidates engage voters in informal settings and complained that the Bush campaign has ripped out of context a perfectly reasonable explanation of the back-and-forth reality of Congress.’

“But Bush’s team contended it was emblematic of the larger case they were making against Kerry:  That he was a flip-flopping Washington insider unqualified to lead the nation in wartime.”

Reflecting on this case, I do remember it.  And my view:  I would give Kerry space to change in mind about a tough issue without charging him with negative flip-flopping.

And, finally, I think Kamala Harris has an adroit way to explain changes when she says “her values have not changed.”