PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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.

The headline for this blog appeared in Washington Post editorial over the weekend.

It makes a good point – the need for verifiable testing if we are to get out from under the pandemic.

But I think there is another missing ingredient in all face in these days of the pandemic – trust.

Trust – in two ways: (1) Trust in government officials who often cash in trust as they behave in unethical ways (just look at Donald Trump, for whom building trust is never an issue), and (2) the loss of mutual trust on the part of citizens who often favor self-centered ways of behaving (just look at those who flocked to beaches and other venues on Memorial Day no matter if they risked infecting others).

Here is the first paragraph on the Post editorial favoring more testing.

“The current approach to the coronavirus pandemic in the United States is based on wishful thinking — that a vaccine or drug therapy will be available by the end of the year, or sooner; that death and illness will taper off with the summer heat, and not come back next fall. But what if none of this happens? What if the novel coronavirus sticks around for a year or two or longer? In that case, diagnostic testing will be critical to our ability to manage lives, jobs, schools and health. Yet, we still lack a federal strategy to get there.”

True.

For me, cultivating trust is a second ingredient in surviving the pandemic — and without it there will be no way to move forward.

Trust in and about government can be built in several ways:

• By telling the truth and saying you don’t know when you don’t know. That was normally a principle when I worked in and around state government here in Oregon for about 40 years.

But, while Oregon is nowhere near as bad as the federal government, building trust has receded as a critical factor in the state.

• Bi-partisanship for the public good. When I see Democrats and Republicans find a way to act together – as they did in the first pandemic relief bills in Congress – it gives a sense of hope that bi-partisanship is possible. Bi-partisanship, however, has tended to recede in view of the next relief bills.

Bi-partisanship is hard to achieve, but possible…except for Trump, as well as those on the far left who wouldn’t know bi-partisanship if it hit them full in the face.

• Deploying a “your word is your bond ethic.” When I worked as a lobbyist in Oregon for about 25 years, I always had this ethic in the back, if not the front, of my mind.

If I told a legislator or another lobbyist something, I stuck to it come hell or high water. If I had to change position because of the inherent tension of issues confronting each other, I would only do so if I told those to whom I had spoken earlier that I had to change.

If the “your word is your bond ethic” existed, it would improve the operation of government.

In my work on an Ethics Committee for Oregon Common Cause, I encountered the following quote from Walter Shaub, the retired director of the Federal Ethics Office. It dealt with the question of ethics, but could just as well have been about the subject of “trust.”

Here is the quote:

“The current ethics program, at least at the federal level, was developed in response to Watergate. The system worked well for 40 years. There was room for improvement, but, for the most part, the system worked well as a preventive mechanism. The flaw was that it was completely dependent on the president’s administration to comply and set an example. The current administration has signaled that it does not want the system to work.”

Building trust in and around government will take concerted work by all involved. It won’t be easy, but nothing worth doing is ever easy. Just worth it.

PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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.

“Thank you for your service.”

Sometimes those words trip off our tongues easily with nothing much behind them.

Today, I utter them with full and deep meaning.

“Thank you for your service.”

I say this to such heroes as retired Colonel Ricky Love, one of my best friends who served well in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

He and many others like him, including those who did not make it home from various war zones, deserve our full and genuine appreciation – not just on this Memorial Day, but on all other days when we are able to value the freedom they preserved.

PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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.

Okay, I was wrong.

I wrote a few days ago that baseball, in a nod to trying to re-start in the coronavirus pandemic, would outlaw spitting.

Good, I said then, as I noted how often I have been tempted to count the number of times baseball players spit when I watched a game on TV.

Stop I would say – and it was a welcome development when the pandemic would do the deed.

But the Wall Street Journal set me straight this week with a story under this headline:

Actually, There Will Be Spitting in Baseball—When Players Are Tested

MLB’s plan for playing through coronavirus involves what may be the most high-profile use of saliva tests, rather than swabs, to screen for infection

The story went on:

“In the bizarro season Major League Baseball (MLB) hopes to have this summer, players will be forced to do the unthinkable in order to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus: Refrain from spitting, a tradition as much a part of the game as the ceremonial first pitch and seventh-inning stretch.

“Under MLB’s proposed health and safety protocol to play amid a global pandemic, sunflower seeds and smokeless tobacco are considered contraband. Communal water jugs are outlawed. Licking one’s fingers is against the rules. Players will be required to keep their saliva in their mouths at all times.

“Except, that is, in one key instance: when they’re being tested for the virus.

“MLB is betting big on saliva tests for coronavirus as the mechanism that will allow it to proceed this year. In doing so, it will become perhaps the highest-profile employer to embrace the approach on such a large scale. The league plans to test all personnel—including players, coaches, umpires and other employees deemed essential—several times a week as part of a plan to play a fan-less, shortened schedule that does not subject employees to a quarantine.”

So, horror of horrors for me, a partial baseball fan, we’ll be back to spitting, part of the so-called “national pastime.”

Makes me want to spit!

PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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 have been trying for months now to understand how President Donald Trump operates.

It is hard to believe a reality TV show host and a businessman of shoddy character even understands what the word strategy means as he flies by the seat his pants as president and says whatever happens to cross his mind. Truth is no barmeter.

In the Washington Post this week, columnist Eugene Robinson put it this way – and I agree with him:

“I find it hard to understand how anyone can construe Trump’s tirades and tweets as anything resembling a strategy. I see, at best, a familiar tactic: He seeks to drag opponents down to his level. He cannot compete with Joe Biden on the basis of ideas, integrity or performance, so he seeks to pull him into the gutter — hence the elaborate attempt to concoct a scandal involving Biden’s son Hunter.”

One of the basic propositions during my 25 years as a lobbyist, augmented early on by 15 years as an Oregon state government manager, was this:

To achieve any management end, it is easy to begin with tactics.  Don’t.   Strategy – a big picture look at what you want to achieve – should be the starting point. And, then, tactics should be developed to achieve the strategy.

For Trump, it’s all about tactics or least whatever crossed his mind and lips moment-by-moment.

Buoyed by columnist Robinson, I felt compelled this week to develop a list of what I consider to be Trump’s actions without strategy –- and some of these may be a repeat of what I have said before about this worst of all U.S. presidents. So here goes.

• First, with Robinson, I say Trump “seeks to drag opponents down to his level. He cannot compete with Joe Biden on the basis of ideas, integrity or performance, so he seeks to pull him into the gutter.”
• Second, Trump lies at every turn. It’s not second instinct for him; it is first instinct. Incredibly, the Washington Post Fact Checker column says Trump has told more than 18,000 lies in three years. It’s enough that “Fact Checker” has to exist in the first place; it’s even more troubling to reckon with the tally of lies.
• Third, Trump instinctively practices a policy of distraction. Rather than working with governors around the country to develop a sound national plan for tracing and testing in the coronavirus pandemic, he castigates Barack Obama and anyone else to distract from his own abysmal performance.

For me, in many ways, the worst of Trump’s diatribes was for him to denigrate the late Senator John McCain, truly a national hero. In life and in death, Trump went after McCain, one of most despicable acts of Trump’s presidency.

There is little question but that we are at war with coronavirus pandemic, as is every country around the world as the virus is no respecter of nationalities or borders.

More than ever, we need a president who will rise to the occasion. Many of us are not surprised to see Trump putting his own welfare above that of the nation.

As written by Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, Trump is busily inciting people across the country — and especially in swing states — to ignore public health guidance on limiting the spread of covid-19 and resume socializing and working in the riskiest of ways.

“Modeling masklessness, he welcomes any sabotage of orderly reopening.”

Such recklessness, in defiance of his own administration’s guidance, Hiatt writes, risks igniting new waves of the disease. That could lead not only to thousands more deaths, but also to further devastation of the economy. It’s not far-fetched to think that this blowback could arrive with the cooler weather next fall — just as people are voting in the presidential election.

“Various theories are offered for this seemingly self-destructive behavior.

“Trump, it is said, can’t think beyond tomorrow’s headline or stock market bounce. His need for instant gratification clouds his ability to plan ahead.

“Or, his perennial hunger for adulation drives him to irrationality. He craves the thanks of tavern-goers in Wisconsin; he is desperate for the roar of his rally crowds.

“Or, he is simply discounting the advice of experts, confident that his gut provides a better guide than their knowledge and experience.

All of these theories may contain some truth.”

So, Trump continues without strategy or rational tactics, thus making things worse than they otherwise would be. And, he wants to be re-elected? No.

PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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.

While all of us have been trying to adjust to the pandemic, a major issue lurks in the background, though it often jumps to the foreground.

It is this:

What should the role of government be and how big should it get?

The Washington Post published a story on the subject under this headline:

Crisis exposes how
America has hollowed
out its government

It was written by veteran Washington, D.C. reporter Dan Balz, who, for years, has been an excellent chronicler of events and trends in the nation’s capitol.

Here is the lead to his story:

“The government’s halting response to the coronavirus pandemic represents the culmination of chronic structural weaknesses, years of underinvestment and political rhetoric that has undermined the public trust — conditions compounded by President Trump’s open hostility to a federal bureaucracy that has been called upon to manage the crisis.”

This reminds me of several perspectives.

• One is that it was only a few months ago when anyone interested in federal politics heard several Democrat presidential candidates promoting ideas to expand hugely the role of the federal government.

Two of those candidates were Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the latter of whom remains in the hunt to join presumed Democrat nominee Joe Biden as his vice president running mate.

Sanders, Warren and others on the far left wanted government to do everything – provide free health care, forgive student debt, adopt a so-called “green standard” for all buildings, etc.

Today, while the issue is no longer the Sanders-Warren agenda, we have big government – and most of us would say it is a necessity to have it. The only way to respond to the pandemic is by relying on government, much as would be the case in any other kind of war.

• A second perspective is how Donald Trump and his minions have so botched the job of preparing for government obligations that those obligations cannot be carried out with any level of competence. If it could be contended that Trump is on the far right politically (I add that it is impossible to know where he stands on anything), various others on the right joined him in lofting an inflamed anti-government stance. To those on the far right, government was the enemy, the so-called “deep state.”

Now, the reality is that we need more than ever the kind of solid government Trump and his minions have destroyed.

• Another perspective relates to my own perceptions about the role and size of government. In part because of my work as a lobbyist for 25 years, I believe elected officials in government often fail to ask hard and pointed questions about government programs, including whether they should exist in the first place, and, if the answer is yes, whether they produce returns on the investment.

Those questions are still important and government officials should still ask them in the current pandemic.

In the Post piece, Balz expanded on the reality of Trump’s failure to understand anything:

“Federal government leaders, beginning with the president, appeared caught unaware by the swiftness with which the coronavirus was spreading through the country — though this was not the first time that an administration seemed ill-prepared for an unexpected shock. But even after the machinery of government clanked into motion, missteps, endemic obstacles and lack of clear communication have plagued the efforts to meet the needs of the nation.

“’A fundamental role of government is the safety and security of its people,’ said Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of homeland security. ‘To me that means you have to maintain a certain base level so that, when an event like a pandemic manifests itself, you can quickly activate what you have and you have already in place a system and plan for what the federal government is going to do and what the states are going to do.’

“That has not been the case this spring. The nation is reaping the effects of decades of denigration of government and also from a steady squeeze on the resources needed to shore up the domestic parts of the executive branch.

“This hollowing out has been going on for years as a gridlocked Congress preferred continuing resolutions and budgetary caps to hardheaded decisions about vulnerable governmental infrastructure and leaders did little to address structural weaknesses.

“The problems have grown worse in the past three years. Trump was elected having never served in government or the military. That was one reason he appealed to many of those who backed him. He came to Washington deeply suspicious of what he branded the ‘deep state.’ Promising to drain the swamp, he has vilified career civil servants and the institutions of government now called upon to perform at the highest levels.”

The question is whether the weaknesses and vulnerabilities exposed by the current crisis will generate a newfound interest among the nation’s elected officials in repairing the infrastructure of government and a sense of urgency on the part of the public to encourage them to do so.

Or will partisanship and public indifference lead to a continuation of the status quo?

Henry Olsen, also writing in the Post, provides a glum perspective.

Commenting on the next virus relief bill in Congress, if there is such a bill, he said recent action by the House to pass a bill that has no chance of being considered in the Senate “is not how a healthy democracy behaves in a crisis.”

“There will always be partisan differences over how to address a crisis,” he wrote. “But a healthy democracy would debate those differences directly and openly. Voters would know what each party’s values are, and legislators could decide whether there’s enough common ground to forge a compromise.

“With unemployment skyrocketing and state and local governments losing tax revenue by the bushel each day, one would think that something could be worked out that satisfies both sides even as neither is ecstatic. Instead, we have a partisan game that merely entrenches both sides in increasingly hardened silos.”

Only time will tell if supposed leaders in Congress will find a way to make reasoned and fair decisions in the face of a recession and calamity on nearly every hand.

PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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.

Do you remember where you were when Mt. St. Helens blew its top 40 years ago?

It’s a question like where you were when President John Kennedy was assassinated, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, or when the Twin Towers went down to a terrorist attack in New York.

With St. Helens, I and two other members of my family – wife Nancy and son Eric – were witnesses to history.

We watched the eruption from our home in Salem, Oregon, though what was saw was the aftermath of the eruption, a cloud that we found out later went up about 14 miles, making it visible about 100 miles south where we lived.

It wasn’t long before ash began falling on our house, the deck, and our cars. Not smart to try to wash the ash off the cars because the substance would leave a trail of scars.

For us, another “eruption” occurred just a few days later.

Our daughter, Lissy, was born and my wife recalls that the labor she went through was quick, as was the birth, thus the word “eruption.”

So, in line with the Mt. St. Helens eruption memories, our daughter is celebrating her 40^th birthday.

The statistics about the St. Helens eruption are staggering.

• The cloud escalated 14 miles up.
• More than 540 million tons of ash were deposited by the eruption, which means that ash landed in 11 states. [To this day, witnesses retain jars of ash, as we do.]
• There was more than $1 billion worth of damage to the surrounding area, including blown up bridges, uprooted timber, and lost homes. The total would equate to almost $4 billion today.
• A total of 57 persons lost their lives in the blast, including a figure named Harry Truman – yes, Harry Truman — who ran a lodge near the mountain and refused to leave in advance of the eruptioin even after being ordered to do so.

I also remember that soon after the blast, one of the rescuers was my brother-in-law, Colonel Dave Wendt, who flew helicopters for the 304^th rescue squadron based in Portland.

As he and his colleagues flew into the damage zone, he took pictures, reporting to us that the ground looked a “moonscape.” Coincidentally, that was same term used by President Jimmy Carter as he toured the site by air a few days later.

Colonel Wendt and his colleagues, in the immediate aftermath of the eruption, were able to rescue several lucky folks who barely escaped death.

[By the way, the St. Helens rescue effort was not Colonel Wendt’s only scrape with tough situations. He flew planes in the Vietnam conflict to rescue downed pilots, was the first officer on a Pan Am jet hijacked to Cuba, and flew cover for the Lake Placid Olympics in New York.  A calling worthy of great respect for his service.]

Regarding President Carter, my business colleague, Gary Conkling, remembers that, at the time, the president was sequestered at the White House, preferring not to leave during the Iran hostage crisis.  For Congressman Les AuCoin, for whom both Gary and I worked, Gary wrote a memo recommending that Carter tour the eruption site from the air in what would be a “presidential act.”

He did and Congressman AuCoin accompanied Carter on Air Force One to view the damage in the West.

Overall, for me, the St. Helens eruption showed again that, however important and capable we think we are, we are not in charge of our own universe.

PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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 wrote the other day about the real solution to the coronavirus pandemic, which any reasonably smart person would know – that includes me, I attest — is vaccines.

The good news is that several are in various stages of development and the normal time frame for such development – 12-18 months – could be shortened, given the extremity of the world’s circumstance.

Hill.com reported on four major efforts by pharmaceutical companies to move on vaccines around the world, often, but not always, with government help.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) showed up with a story — excerpts below — that provides more information, including background on a tough, but real, issue – who gets vaccines first and how long it might take for vaccines to be available generally.

The WSJ story appeared under this headline:

Coronavirus Vaccine Frontrunners Emerge, Rollouts Weighed

Drug-makers build capacity to make hundreds of millions of doses, while authorities discuss: Who will get it first?

Here are more excerpts.

*********

Governments and drug-makers are weighing how to roll out coronavirus vaccines, including reserving the first batches for health-care workers, as several shots race to early leads.

Of more than 100 vaccines in development globally, at least eight have started testing in humans, including candidates from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. At the same time, pharmaceutical giants like Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca PLC and Sanofi SA are building capacity to make hundreds of millions of doses of their own or their partners’ vaccines.

The efforts are part of a larger rush, including at the White House, to line up funding for accelerated testing and expanded manufacturing capacity, all to make doses available in the U.S. starting as soon as this fall.

Yet, there isn’t a guarantee that any of the most advanced vaccine candidates will prove to work safely on such a short timetable. Some, like vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, are based on relatively new technologies that haven’t been approved previously.

Once a vaccine is proved in clinical testing to work safely, drug makers expect the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would move quickly to permit its use, even if the agency doesn’t have all the evidence it typically collects before granting an approval.

The FDA authorized such an emergency use of the drug remdesivir from Gilead Sciences Inc., for treating hospitalized Covid-19 patients on May 1, days after a study showed it shortened hospital stays.

Several drug makers that have been building up their capabilities to make coronavirus vaccines also have pledged to deliver millions of doses this year. Yet, a fuller supply to vaccinate the general population might not become available until well into 2021, according to company projections and estimates by vaccine experts.

“Ideally we’d want seven or eight billion doses the day after licensure, so we can vaccinate the whole world,” said Walter Orenstein, associate director of Emory University’s vaccine center in Atlanta. “The likelihood is we won’t have enough to vaccinate even the entire U.S. population” when a vaccine first becomes available, he said.

The non-profit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which promotes the equitable allocation of vaccines around the globe, recently agreed to give more than $380 million to Novavax Inc. to help develop a vaccine that would be made in various countries for distribution world-wide.

Groups likely to be at the head of the line for access are front-line health-care workers and first responders, plus essential workers like grocery, pharmacy, food-supply and mass-transit employees, said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who serves on a committee with federal and drug-industry officials that is trying to accelerate coronavirus vaccine development.

Johnson & Johnson expects to have some batches of its vaccine ready by early 2021, which Chief Scientific Officer Paul Stoffels said should be sufficient to vaccinate health-care workers globally. The company expects to eventually make more than a billion doses.

Moderna is expanding its vaccine production capacity, including via a partnership with Swiss contract manufacturer Lonza Ltd., to make tens of millions of doses a month by the end of this year, and eventually as many as one billion doses a year, said Chief Executive Stephane Bancel.

One open question is whether the elderly will benefit from a coronavirus vaccine. Immune systems decline with age, which can reduce vaccines’ effectiveness in older adults.

**********

I say full bore ahead with vaccine development. It is the only way we get back to any sense of normalcy.

PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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.

It’s often interesting how a well-turned phrase can get to the bottom of an issue without going through all of the detail.

Thus, the one in the headline.

“If President Franklin Delano Roosevelt has taken the Trump approach, this column would be in German.”

The column in question was one written by the Washington Post’s Max Boot and skewers Donald Trump for his strategy – if he actually operates with a strategy – to distract from his huge mistakes by criticizing someone else — everyone else.

As Boot says, if this happened in World War II, we’d be speaking German.  Roosevelt concentrated on winning the war, so the allies did.

The Boot quotes lead the opening again of one of three departments I run – the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering. [The others are the Department of Pet Peeves and the Department of “Just Saying.”]

From Max Boot in the Washington Post: “It remains to be seen whether the ‘very stable genius’ will succeed in distracting the public. He has definitely distracted himself.

“Trump has been distracted recently from managing the pandemic by fixating on Michael Flynn and related matters, ranting in private about the Russia investigation, complaining about James Comey and others in the FBI, and making clear he wanted to talk in the run-up to the election about law enforcement targeting him.

“If FDR had taken Trump’s approach, this column would be in German.”

Comment: Read the last paragraph. Nothing more needs to be said.

From Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler: He and his colleagues explore Trump’s tendency to double down on falsehoods in their forthcoming book, “Donald Trump and His Assault on the Truth.”

“One hallmark of Trump’s dishonesty is that, if he thinks a false or incorrect claim is a winner, he will repeat it constantly, no matter how often it has been proven wrong,” they write. Though “many politicians are embarrassed,” Trump “keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version.”

Comment: So true. Trump’s instinct is to lie all the time, especially if lies reflect great, undeserved credit for him given his narcissistic personality.

From the Washington Post: Like Governor Jared Polis, Gina Raimondo in Rhode Island is accepting the reality that the coronavirus will be with us for some time, and the state needs to focus on protecting the vulnerable while mitigating stress on health-care providers.

“Just because we may re-open the economy with the stay-at-home order doesn’t mean people are going to stop getting sick,” she said recently.

Comment: Raimondo sounds to me like one of the good governors who is trying “to do the right thing,” as tough as that is when there is tension between life and livelihood.

From Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post: “But then, this has been the story from the get-go: Trump minimizing, ignoring and contradicting expert advice as part of his magical thinking that refuses to grapple with reality, especially when reality reflects poorly on him.

“The president sought to obscure major problems by trying to recast them as triumphs. He repeatedly boasted, for instance, that the United States has conducted more tests than any other country, even though the total of 6.75 million is a fraction of the 2 million to 3 million tests per day that many experts say is needed to safely reopen.’

“Where Trump leads, his cult will follow. Trump can rely on his base’s anti-science bent, especially when he drowns out or ignores his own advisers. If he does not pay attention, why should his followers?”

Comment: For the life of me, I cannot understand why so many Americans continue to support Trump who clearly stands as the worst president in U. S. history.

PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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.

Like many others in this “pandemic era,” I look for good news where I can find it.

It was not hard to do so this morning when I read the Wall Street Journal. There, I found a story on the potential re-start of professional baseball.

The story recounted negotiations between baseball brass and the players’ union.

I am a sometimes baseball fan, not a regular one, so I won’t go into detail on all of the back-and-forth negotiations. But one aspect caught my attention. It was this:

“Under baseball’s proposal, the game would look considerably different—and not just because there would be no fans in the seats. High-fives and spitting potentially would be banned.”

Note the most critical fact: SPITTING WOULD BE BANNED.

See, during the pandemic, I can be impressed with the smallest of often irrelevant details.

But, over the years as I have watched baseball on TV, I could not help by notice a salient fact – almost everyone spits. On occasion, I even was tempted to try over the hours of a game on TV to count the number of times I saw spitting.

Which only confirms, I suspect, the sad state of my mind on some occasions.

Spitting will be no longer if baseball actually re-starts.

I say good news as I look for anything bright in the dull and foreboding pandemic.

 PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This 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 of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, 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.

It doesn’t take prescience to know that a vaccine or vaccines will be the key to resolving the coronavirus pandemic.

However, easier to say that achieve we were told by the experts.

They said it usually takes 12 to 18 months, at a minimum, for a new drug to go through all of clinical trials and other tests to assure efficacy.

I was encouraged – we all need potential silver linings in the black clouds of the pandemic these days – when I read a story in hill.com that charted the development of four potential vaccines.

None is proven yet, but pharmaceutical companies believe they are pursuing the right goals. Here are excerpts from the story on four U.S. and European vaccine efforts that have started clinical trials.

Oxford University/AstraZeneca

Some of the highest hopes, and the most ambitious timeline, come from researchers at Oxford University, who are now working alongside British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.

“The aim is to have at least a million doses by about September, once you know the vaccine efficacy results and then move even faster from there,” Oxford professor Adrian Hill told the BBC last month.

The potential vaccine began testing in healthy volunteers in a Phase I clinical trial late last month at five sites in England. Data from that trial could be available this month, and later-stage trials could start by the middle of the year, AstraZeneca said on April 30.

The potential vaccine has had success in preventing coronavirus in rhesus macaque monkeys during a test at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) lab in Montana, The New York Times reported last month. It works by using a weakened version of a different virus known as adenovirus, which causes infections in chimpanzees, to deliver genetic material of part of the coronavirus into the body. The body then would generate an immune response to the section of coronavirus, providing protection.

Moderna/NIH

The Massachusetts biotech company Moderna Inc. is partnering with Anthony Fauci’s team at the National Institutes of Health on another leading vaccine candidate.

Moderna said last week it will begin a Phase II study with 600 people “shortly” and plans to start a Phase III trial with thousands of people by “early summer.”

Stéphane Bancel, the company’s CEO, told CNBC that the process is progressing at an unexpectedly fast clip.

“It has gone faster than my best case scenario back in January,” Bancel said. “When we started this back on Jan. 11, partnering with the team of Dr. Tony Fauci, we were hoping to get in the clinic in the summer.”

Instead, Phase I clinical trials started on March 16, and Phase II trials are about to begin.

He said his employees have been “working long days, working seven days a week since January,” and collaborating closely with the NIH and Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Through a partnership with the Swiss biotech company Lonza, manufacturing of the vaccine could start as early as July, Bancel said, even before trials are complete.\

Still, he acknowledged all that vaccine candidates worldwide “will all be supply constrained for quite some time, meaning we won’t be able to make as many products as will be required to vaccinate everybody on the planet.” He anticipates working with governments to decide how to allocate the first doses, for example to health care workers and first responders.

This potential vaccine works differently than the Oxford one. It uses messenger RNA (mRNA) to deliver the genetic code for part of the coronavirus, which then provokes a response from the body’s immune system, offering protection.\

Pfizer/BioNTech

Pfizer and the German company BioNTech are also working together on a potential vaccine using mRNA.

They are testing four potential vaccines at once, using different formats of mRNA to see which one works best.

The companies last week announced they had begun a Phase I trial with up to 360 people at sites including New York University and the University of Maryland.

Mikael Dolsten, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC that the company expects to produce “millions of doses” by October, with plans for “tens of millions” later this year and “hundreds of millions” in 2021.

“So it’s a very quick plan,” Dolsten said.

Pfizer, a drug manufacturing powerhouse, said it has selected its facilities in Massachusetts, Michigan and Missouri, along with one in Belgium, to be the initial manufacturing centers for the vaccine.

Inovio

The biotech company Inovio is working on a potential vaccine that uses DNA rather than RNA to code part of the coronavirus and produce an immune response.

The company says its DNA vaccines can be produced faster and stored more easily, in addition to being safer than other types. This vaccine would require an added step of a hand-held device to deliver an electrical pulse that helps the vaccine enter human cells.

Inovio announced at the end of April that it had enrolled 40 people in its Phase I study at the University of Pennsylvania and a clinic in Kansas City. Interim results are expected by June and further stages of trials could start this summer, the company said.

“If we are on track, this could be as early as by the end of this year or early next year,” Inovio CEO J. Joseph Kim told The Hill when asked when the first doses of vaccine could be ready for the public.

He said it is “quite a challenge” to be able to scale up manufacturing a “thousandfold” to produce hundreds of millions of doses, and that more funding from the federal government would help.\

“More funding and resources will help us scale up to a larger manufacturing scale,” he said.

Kim acknowledged the skepticism about his company, namely that it has never had a product approved by the FDA.

But the company has shown promising results in other areas like the MERS virus and cervical cancer, Kim argued.

“I think healthy skepticism is always fair,” he said.

Ultimately, the results of the COVID-19 trials will have to show the coronavirus vaccine is effective.

In addition to finding a vaccine or more than one, a critical factor will be how long it takes to produce sufficient quantity, given that the pandemic is not a respecter of persons or borders. It is, in fact, worldwide.

That’s why, beyond what one firm is doing by securing manufacturing centers early, a friend of mine told me yesterday he hopes governments will step up to the plate to provide financing – even in the form of loans – to help companies lease more space and higher more staff to build more and more vaccines.

And, another point from me – if companies make money on the process, so be it.