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 ask the question in this blog headline for at least two reasons:

1. When a new two-year budget is proposed by a governor on December 1 – just as Governor Tina Kotek did a few days ago in accord with state law – it can come across as just a set of numbers.  So many numbers on so many pages that it is difficult to understand their context.

• But, based on my 40 years watching and working in state government in Oregon, I know that, buried beneath the numbers, lie public policy issues important to all Oregonians.  The challenge is to go beneath the surface to find them.

Today, I’ll spare more details about this budget, which I wrote about in my blog yesterday. 

Instead, I’ll emphasize what I may be the true purposes of the budget recommendations produced by Kotek.

It is #2 above.

Smart governors – and there have been smart ones in Oregon’s recent history, even if you disagree with them – will use the opportunity of preparing a recommended budget to outline where they want Oregon to go in the future.

Not just numbers.  But policy directions.

Here is how the Oregonian newspaper summarized a few of the directions recommended by Kotek, ones that lie beneath the surface:

• A big budget increase for the Labor Bureau

• Money to target fentanyl distributors

• A new attorney to investigate cases of missing and murdered indigenous people

• Money to “protect Oregon’s values” [whatever that means, though it may be a nod to protecting Oregon from president-elect Donald Trump’s plans]

• Money to help incarcerated women

Each of these proposals cited by the Oregonian are probably different than what Kotek would cite if she were asked about major “asks” in her budget.  Her emphasis – and the one I saw through the budget document — more new housing and more efforts to reduce homelessness.

So, say what you will, all of this will be up for grabs in the 2025 legislative session, which begins in January and runs for about six months.  With super-majority control by Democrats in the House and the Senate, Kotek will likely get most of what she wants.

Make your own judgment beyond the numbers.  Will what the governor wants go down well with citizens in the state?

As the old saying goes, only time will tell.

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.

This blog headline is how the Oregonian newspaper characterized the details in the next two-year budget (2025-27) released on time this year by Governor Tina Kotek, now in the middle of her first term as Oregon governor.

Before getting into a few details, I well remember the years, as lobbyist or a state government official,  that I waited with great interest – a combination of desire and dread — for December 1.

That’s when, according to state law, governors must release what is called their “Recommended Budget” for the next biennium.

Further, the release is supposed to be a series of recommendations for spending, not proposals for new taxes.

In the past, some governors have ignored this restriction, but this time, it appears that Kotek abided by the constraint.  However, there is little doubt but that, when the legislative session rolls around in January, she will be proposing tax increases in various forms.

And she will have the benefit of super-majority control by Democrats in both the Oregon House and Oregon Senate.  Which means Democrats can pass tax increases, if they choose to so, without Republican support, though it is far too early to predict what will happen when it comes to tax increases because such increases, regardless of party, are always controversial.

I remember, on or near each December 1, standing around near the Governor’s Office in the center of the State Capitol, waiting to get my hands on a copy of the new State of Oregon budget.  It always looked like a phone book in terms of its size.

Then, my attention turned to trying to discern detail in the thick book, which always was difficult to find, in part because such detail was obscured by so many numbers.  Plus, while some budget-makers herald the document for its transparency, it often, instead, is opaque.

At one point, when I worked for state government before I became a lobbyist, I was in charge of developing a “small book” to explain the budget in terms that would make more sense than a tome – important because, imbedded in all of the budget detail, lie important public policy issues that affect where citizens live and work in Oregon.

Back to the Kotek’s budget recommendations.

The Oregonian wrote a general summary this way:

“Governor Tina Kotek doubled down Monday on her calls to devote more state money to reduce Oregon’s homelessness and housing crises, bolster mental health care, and improve outcomes for children, priority areas she’s flagged repeatedly during her first two years in office.

“She did so when revealing her plans for the state’s 2025-27 budget, which she proposes to total $39.3 billion in general and lottery fund spending, up 17 per cent from the one lawmakers approved in 2023.”

Kotek also called for diverting $150 million from the state’s reserve to pay for fighting fires in Oregon, both in the past and in the future.  She has called for a Special Legislative Session this month to do this deed.

Various Kotek priorities:

• She proposed a new attorney in the Oregon Department of Justice who would focus on investigating cases of missing and murdered indigenous people and over $40 million to “protect Oregon values.”

• She proposed more than $700 million to fight homelessness in Oregon, including $218 million for Oregon shelters, $188 million to transition Oregonians out of homelessness, and $173 million to keep people from becoming homeless in the first place.

• She proposed $880 million in new bonding authority for housing production, the bulk of the money going to spur construction of affordable apartments.  The rest would subsidize construction of owner-occupied homes.

• She proposed to add nearly 1,000 mental health treatment beds by the end of 2026, as well as funding for (a) new staff dealing with mental health issues;  (b) expanding  provider rate increases for mental health treatment; and (c) spending money on mental health treatment for children.

• She proposed a $600 million increase in the budget for K-12 state schools, saying she was “a little tired of just always fighting over the state school fund number.”  Though there is little doubt but that such a fight will continue this session.

Not surprisingly, the leader of Republicans in the Senate showed up with a news release under this headline:  “Senate Republican Leader Criticizes Governor’s Bloated Budget Proposal.”

As I said, that is to be expected as Democrats – led by Kotek – and Republicans in the minority in both the House and Senate begin sparring over the budget.  Which stands as the only issue lawmakers have to solve when show up in Salem.

So, what happens now?

Well, legislators and the governor will spend the next seven or eight months coming up with final figures for the budget, where revenue must equal expenditures.

Note that last phrase!  The state’s budget must be in balance, so whatever your view – Democrat, Republican, liberal or conservative – you have no choice but to negotiate within available revenue.

As a lobbyist, I always paid a lot of attention to the budget deliberations because the success of many of my firm’s clients rode on the outcome. However, now, in retirement, I look at all this quickly and without much at stak

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.

President Joe Biden’s decision to grant a pardon to his son, Hunger, “might not be politically smart, but it is defensible.”

The quote is from a column in the Washington Post by Eugene Robinson and I repeat it for one basic reason:  I agree with it as it cites what almost any father would do.

Here is more from Robinson:

“If I were President Joe Biden, I would have done the same thing.  I would have pardoned a son who faced possible federal prison time, not because of the crimes he committed, but because of me.

“The president’s decision to absolve his son Hunter reneges on a campaign promise and can certainly be described as hypocritical.  It creates a political problem for the Democrat Party and will be seen by many as a stain on Biden’s legacy.

“Obviously, Biden is prepared to accept those consequences. I would be, too.

“In his statement on Sunday announcing the pardon, Biden got to the heart of the matter:  “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”  

“This is clearly true.  If a son of mine were being subjected to selective prosecution, and I had the power to make it all go away, that’s what I would do.”

As I said, Robinson has it right. 

There will be a lot of to’ing and fro-ing over this decision.  But, for Biden, family prevailed again over politics, the so-called “rule of law,” and any other factor you might want to cite.

He is prepared to live with the consequences and, of course, so is Hunter Biden.

As a father, I would be, too.

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.

It’s one thing to do what I often do, which is to criticize Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters for their over-the-top agenda, citing a growing list of offenses.

It’s another to go behind the scenes and try to ascertain the VALUES that drive the current Trump movement.

It takes a better analyst than me to achieve this introspection. 

So, I turn to David Brooks, a talented writer who prepared a column for the New York Times that appeared under the headline I borrowed for this blog – “The Moral Challenge of Trumpism.”

The quality of Brooks’ work prompts me to repeat his column in my blog this morning.

*********

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

I admire Mitt Romney.  He is, by all accounts, an outstanding husband and father.  He built a successful investment firm by supporting successful young businesses like Staples.  He served the public as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and as a governor.  As a senator, he had the courage to vote to convict Donald Trump twice, in the two separate impeachment trials, when few other Republicans did.

But as Noah Millman writes on Substack, people in the MAGA movement take a different view of Romney.

In private life, Romney compliantly conformed to the bourgeois norms of those around him.  In business, he contributed to the bloating of the finance and consulting sector.  As a politician, he bent himself to the needs of the moment, moving from moderate Republican to ‘extreme conservative.’  As a senator, he sought the approval of the Washington establishment.

Millman’s underlying point is it’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power.  It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system.  The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.

The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.

In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government.  We are formed by these institutions.  People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ.

Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation.  We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.

MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings.  We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be.  Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.

What does heroism look like according the MAGA morality?  It looks like the sort of people whom Trump has picked to be in his cabinet.  The virtuous man in this morality is self-assertive, combative, transgressive and vengeful.  He’s not afraid to break the rules and come to his own conclusions.  He has contempt for institutions and is happy to be a battering force to bring them down.  He is unbothered by elite scorn but, in fact, revels in it and goes out of his way to generate it.

In this mind-set, if the establishment regards you as a sleazeball, you must be doing something right.  If the legal system indicts you, you must be a virtuous man.

In this morality, the fact that a presidential nominee is accused of sexual assault is a feature, not a bug.  It’s a sign that this nominee is a manly man.  Manly men go after what they want.  They assert themselves and smash propriety — including grabbing women “by the pussy” if they feel like it.

In this worldview, a nominee enshrouded in scandal is more trustworthy than a person who has lived an honest life.

The scandal-shrouded nominee is cast out from polite society.  He’s not going to run to a New York publisher and write a tell-all memoir bashing the administration in which he served.  Such a person is not going to care if he is scorned by the civil servants in the agency he has been hired to dismantle.

The corrupt person owes total fealty to Donald Trump.  There is no other realm in which he can achieve power and success except within the MAGA universe.  Autocrats have often preferred to surround themselves with corrupt people because such people are easier to control and, if necessary, destroy.

In other words, MAGA represents a fundamental challenge not only to conventional politics but also to conventional morality.  In his own Substack essay, Damon Linker gets to the point:  “Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues.”

I suspect that over the next couple of years we will see a series of running conflicts between institutionalists and anti-institutionalists — not only a power struggle over the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, the schools and the institutions of democracy itself but also a values struggle over what sort of person we should admire, what values should govern our society.  The battle is on for the hearts and souls of the coming generations.

The anti-institutionalists have advantages.  It’s much easier to degrade and destroy than to preserve and reform.  We live amid a multi-decade crisis of legitimacy, during which strong voices ranging from Oliver Stone’s on the left to Tucker Carlson’s on the right have sent the message that everything is rotten.

But character is destiny.  An administration of narcissists will be a snake pit, in which strife and self-destructive scandal will snuff out effective action.  Running things is hard, and changing things is harder, and it’s rarely done well by solipsistic outsiders.

Those of us in the institutionalist camp will have to learn the lessons taught by George C. Marshall. Marshall, who served as chief of staff of the Army during World War II, and was an institutionalist through and through.  He was formed by Army manners.  The very core of his ethic was this:  I will never put my own ambitions above the needs of the Army or the nation.

Yet Marshall was no standpatter.  He didn’t respond to threats from outside by clinging fiercely to the status quo.  He was a comprehensive reformer.

When he was asked to lead the Infantry School at Fort Benning, for example, he revolutionized the curriculum.  He sent units out on maneuvers without maps because in real war you always have insufficient information.  He shifted military training toward mechanized warfare and nearly doubled the number of hours of instruction devoted to tactics.  He spent his career pushing against the stifling traditionalism that could stultify his institution.

Today it really is true that the Pentagon is administratively a mess.  It really is true the meritocracy needs to be fundamentally rethought. It really is true that Congress is dysfunctional and the immigration system is broken.  But positive change will come from people who have developed a loving devotion to those institutions over years of experience, not people who despise them — the modern-day George Marshalls rather than the Pete Hegseths, Tulsi Gabbards and Robert F. Kennedy Jrs.

What kind of person do we want our children to become — reformers who honor their commitments to serve and change the institutions they love or performative arsonists who vow to burn it all down?

*********

Contemplate Brooks’ thought if you have time to do so and consider this commitment:  Live your life as God would have you live it, eschew Trumpism, and try to make the world a better place, starting in your own neighborhood.

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.

There has been a lot of talk these days about what should characterize solid journalism in an age when people who disagree with each other don’t know how “to disagree agreeably.”

That was a phrase that marked much of my tenure as a lobbyist and government official in Oregon over about 40 years.

And, as a reflect on those 40 years, they also began with a stint in journalism as I worked for a daily newspaper in Oregon.  There, I covered local government, including the city council and the county commission, then added oversight for the port in the region.

In all those positions, I reported on local officials who didn’t always agree, but also didn’t appear to hate each other when push came to shove.

Those in government in Oregon – perhaps even in Washington, D.C. — knew more then than they know now about how to disagree in government hearing rooms but agree at the end of the day that the opponent was not an enemy.

Give Donald Trump lots of credit – or, rather, debit — for dissolving the potential to reach collegial government, especially in D.C., though many states mimic his overbearing style. 

In Oregon, it’s less about Trump than about Democrats who have been in charge for so many years that Republicans worry that they hardly matter anymore.  Democrats, in response, often say they will talk with Republicans.

For my part, I have thought a bit about how I would function as a reporter today.  So it was that, as I read the Washington Post – one of the best newspapers going in these days of social media – I was drawn to a summary of the Post’s mission statement.

It is worth reading – here it is:

“The mission of The Washington Post is defined in a set of principles written by Eugene Meyer, who bought the newspaper in 1933.  Today, they are displayed in brass linotype letters in an entrance to the newsroom.  (His gender references have been supplanted by our policy of inclusion, but the values remain.)

“The Seven Principles for the Conduct of a Newspaper:

• The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.
• The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.
• As a disseminator of the news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman.
• What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as for the old.
• The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.  [And, in this case, the owner is Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.]
• In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good.
• The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public officials.”

Those are worthy principles for all of us to follow, not just in journalism, but as we apply the basic principles to life in general.

So, kudos to the Post for enunciating its credo.