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.

Those who know me know that I like words better than numbers, charts, graphs and even, most of the time, photos.

So I could have opened one of five departments I manage – the Department of Words Matter.  Instead, I just post this.

The following paragraph comes from a column by Frank Bruni, who writes for the New York Times and teaches at Duke University.

In each weekly column, he appends submissions from readers about good words they have read in columns other than his own.

Here is one that appeared this morning:

“In Defector, David Roth nailed the president’s style of, um, oratory:  ‘Things come out of Donald Trump’s mouth, then just keep on coming out of it.  And Trump has wed incontinent words to incoherent actions.  The sum of the wreckage this has made is staggering; fixing it will take a long time or not happen at all.  This is just one of those things you have to walk around knowing.”

This was submitted by a reader from New Jersey and it captures very well the tendency by president Donald Trump to allow words to spew out of his mouth, even if they make no sense.  He just speaks without thinking.