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.

Washington Post columnist Matt Bai wrote the other day to express deep concern about a man who could become president.

Yes, J.D. Vance who, if he becomes vice president alongside a man, Donald Trump who will be 78-years-old if he becomes president, perish the thought.

About Vance, Bai said, “He is not just a running mate, but a man who stands a significant chance of running the country.”

For me, that statement rings even more foreboding after Vance managed to create a false impression in the debate yesterday against Democrat Tim Walz — a false impression that he was reasonable and reasoned, without, unfortunately, having to defend many of the crazy things he has said and done over the last few weeks.

Though I didn’t watch debate – I don’t watch such things anymore – what I read in national newspapers the day after suggested that Vance came across as a different person than he actually is, which is that he wants to be like Donald Trump and to lead the MAGA crowd.

More from Bai in what he wrote before the debate:

“To understand why Vance could be the most consequential figure on either presidential ticket this year, and why you should pay close attention to his debate with Tim Walz, consider what almost happened to Richard M. Nixon.

“In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower needed a running mate and settled on Nixon, a 39-year-old first-term senator and military veteran, who had found instant celebrity among his party’s arch-conservatives for his ardent, often misleading attacks on alleged communists.  Nixon was, in other words, eerily similar to Vance — at least in his résumé.

“What you might not remember is that in 1955, Eisenhower, who at 65 was considered a notably old president, suffered a massive heart attack while on a golfing trip in Denver.  That Ike survived was pretty much a flip of the coin.  Had he died, America would have seen the Nixon presidency 14 years earlier than it actually did.”

Bai added that “we should not get to Election Day without pausing to consider that Trump is 78 and, statistically speaking, far more likely to die in office than the vast majority of our presidents were.  Which means we have to evaluate Vance, not just as a No. 2, but also as a man who stands a significant chance of running the country.”

Bai worries about what that would mean – and, given Vance’s real history, so do I.

Bai said that, “Like Trump in 2016, Vance has virtually no political experience; his only qualification when he ran for Senate two years ago — yes, it was that recent — was having written a best-selling memoir.

“We have only his accumulated rhetoric to go on — and the more you analyze that, the more it seems like maybe a job for a therapist rather than a policy expert.

“While other aspects of Vance’s worldview have come and gone depending on what’s expedient, one thing has remained chillingly consistent.  Vance is bizarrely obsessed with setting down rules for women in society, almost as if this were something America’s women were pleading with him to clarify.

His view, Bai writes, can be summarized this way:  

“This His I won’t compile a list here of his various moral edicts (others have), but I think we can fairly summarize Vance’s worldview this way: =e biological purpose of women is to have children, and after they’ve raised those children, their only remaining purpose is to raise their children’s children.  If they don’t have children, then they are ancillary members of the community and should have less say in how we’re governed.  And if they weren’t born here, or if they’re gay or transgender, then they’re polluting the common culture.”

And this from Bai:

“Vance stands at the vanguard of the millennials — the first American generation to see life as public performance, an unending series of selfies and posts and provocation.

“And maybe that’s the key to understanding him.  I think he attaches no real meaning to governance, beyond the opportunity to be an influencer.  He affects a nerdier, more cerebral veneer than Trump, but in this they are the same:  The point of the whole exercise is to be seen.

“Take a hard look at Vance, a man who could well become president overnight, and decide for yourself whether he is a kind of holy warrior for male superiority and White culture or whether he’s simply settled on the persona that makes him viral.”

I hope women, as they vote in the next few weeks, will take a hard look at both Trump and Vance and end up believing that their tarnished view of women would be going back, not forward.

I add that, the other day on a cruise from Montreal and back to Montreal – yes, that takes 10 days on the St. Lawrence River – I looked again at an old movie, “The American President.”

Good respite from focusing on today’s politics.

One of the stars, Michael Douglas, was shown making a great statement to the press about his girlfriend (he was a widower) who had come under political attack.

The line I remember was this:  “In this country we have serious problems and we need serious people who will deal with them.”

Not buffoons like Trump and Vance who see themselves as the center of their universe, which is anti-women – not to mention anti-the rest of us.