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.

Anyone who knows me knows that I like words.

Better than numbers, charts, graphs, and even photos.

So it is that I enjoy reading columns by Frank Bruni, who writes for the New York Times.  He likes words, too, and uses them well.

A recent column from Bruni said this:

“In The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Philip Martin praised the writer Walter Isaacson’s depictions of the authors of the Declaration of Independence in his new book, ‘The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,’ about the document’s opening words:

“He doesn’t carve them into monuments.  He lets them breathe as men at work, leaning over a draft, arguing about commas, listening for cadence.  You can feel their hope that a sentence might do what armies could not:  Define a people by the rhythm of a thought.  That faith in language, more than any creed, is the American religion:  The belief that words, if built well, can hold our contradictions long enough for us to grow into them.”

Note the phrase, “listening for cadence.” 

When I have a chance, that’s what I like to do – listening for how words flow together, as Bruni would say, “in cadence.”

At the end of all Bruni’s columns, he quotes good words that his followers have sent him from around the country – quotes in various newspapers.

The fact is, Bruni says, good words can help us surmount our disagreements, or least understand our differences better.