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 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 a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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.

On this day, as analysts across the board try to interpret results of elections in Virginia and New Jersey – elections that may portend a wave of Democrat victories in the coming mid-term elections – it is worth looking at more good quotes.

So, the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering, one of the departments I run as director, is open again.

From Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ): Yelp does not give two hoots about Russia. Yelp’s problem is having to compete with Google in providing online reviews while depending on Google for traffic. News stories incriminating Google and Facebook for transmitting “fake news” are written by reporters whose amour propre is offended by fake news nearly as much as their paychecks are undermined by it. Bottom line: Skepticism is an endlessly useful quality to cultivate.”

Comment: Jenkins’ last sentence is a particularly good one. Skepticism is a solid trait to possess in this day of fake news and other mindless campaigns to win supporters. But should skepticism yield to cynicism? I say no. Stay skeptical.

From WSJ editorial writers:  “Mr. Trump tried to distance himself from the defeat by tweeting from Asia that ‘Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for.’ Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!’ “Sometimes Mr. Trump’s comments are so transparently false you wonder if he’s laughing as he writes.”

Comment: For Trump, it’s always about him – all the time. He endorsed Gillespie, but, when Gillespie lost, it was because, Trump says, “he didn’t embrace me.” No, the consensus of many analysts is that Gillespie’s loss amounted to a repudiation of Trump in the minds of Virginia voters.

Daniel Henninger in the WSJ:  “Ed Gillespie is the canary in the mine shaft for Republican politics. We’ll push that further: Virginia is the canary in the mine shaft for all of American politics.

“Years ago, coal miners who worked down amid the dangers of carbon monoxide would keep a caged canary nearby. If the canary looked dead, the miners got out. The big difference for our comparison is that while miners are smart enough to recognize toxic gas, our two political parties are not. The American people are the canaries.”

Comment: I have to confess that, while I heard the canary line before, I didn’t know its derivation. As Henninger described it: “Years ago, coal miners who worked down amid the dangers of carbon monoxide would keep a caged canary nearby. If the canary looked dead, the miners got out. The big difference for our comparison is that, while miners are smart enough to recognize toxic gas, our two political parties are not. The American people are the canaries.” From Henninger, a well-honed image.

More from Henninger:  “For Democrats, political identity is by now well-established as a function of one’s race, gender or sexual self-definition. Refined further, a Democrat is a ‘person of color’ or a ‘woman’ or a ‘transgender’ person. Those who don’t qualify for a category keep mum. From these identities, flow many streams of potential violations, slights and transgressions justifying political action against ‘them.’  The Democrats’ not unreasonable takeaway from Virginia will be that identity politics works, so do more of it.”

Comment: The point is that, so far in this country, “identity politics” works. There is not enough evidence to spot a trend, but the early indications no doubt will not be lost on Democrat strategies heading toward the mid-terms.

Still more from Henninger:  “The Republicans’ political identity, if the media consensus is to be believed, is almost wholly a function of some inchoate white anger also directed at ‘ them.’   Donald Trump won the presidency because he mined white anger at the margins against a different “them” of immigrants and globalization, meaning the whole wide world is arrayed against whatever it means to be a “white male” in 21st-century America.  The Republicans’ logical takeaway from Virginia should be that in competitive election venues their political anger has bigger numbers than your anger.”

Comment: Republicans ought to figure out some other way to build credibility with voters that trying to use just anger. That’s what Trump did in his election, now about a year in the rear-view mirror. Going forward, there should be something other than just anger.

From Michael Gerson in the Washington Post:  “Political commentators are supposed to be somewhat objective and analytical when it comes to tracking trends. In that spirit, I find the polling snapshot of President Trump at one year since his election to be interesting — if ‘interesting’ is defined as a downward spiral of polarization, pettiness and prejudice that threatens the daily functioning and moral standing of the American republic.”

Comment: Gerson used the last phrase in his piece to indicate how far “we” are groveling toward the bottom, sometimes in our conduct individual-to-individual, but surely in our tolerance of politics that heads toward the basement.  Gerson says both parties, Republicans and Democrats, are exhausting themselves, which leads me to opine that it may be time for a third party – one that capitalizes on a move to middle where the best solutions lie anyway.

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 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 a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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.

If you consider what is happening politically in this country, the question in the headline resonates.

Neither the Republicans or the Democrats appear to have the wherewithal to govern effectively.

If governing means the ability to solve pressing societal problems, then neither party can do the job.

If governing means the ability to distinguish between issues that require government intervention and those that don’t, then neither party can do the job.

If governing means the ability of those in high elective office to understand how to disagree agreeably with the nation’s overall interest at heart, then neither party can do the job.

Or, consider President Donald Trump, who, in major surprise, won the nation’s top political job a year ago, though he didn’t take office for a few months. His propensity to revert to his twitter account seemingly every night, sends impossible messages.

It also makes it well-nigh impossible for those who work for him to do their jobs – which, come to think of it, may be just what he wants because, remember, he want all the focus to be on him. How can you work for someone who changes his tune with every tweet?

In a piece in the Wall Street Journal, columnist William Galston put it this way:

“President Trump has gradually discovered the meaning of the oath he swore on Jan. 20, and he doesn’t seem to like it. In the course of an interview on ‘The Larry O’Connor Show’ last week, he said, ‘The saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.’

“Meet James Madison’s Constitution, Mr. President. It is nothing like a family business. It is designed to frustrate you.”

Mr. Galston continues:

“The point of the Constitution is not to do the bidding of any one institution, let alone a single individual. It is to preserve liberty by thwarting tyranny, which Madison defined in Federalist 47 as ‘the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands.’

“The preamble to the Constitution provides a terse statement of the purposes it intends to promote. The body of the document lays out in some detail the institutions through which these purposes may be pursued legitimately. They channel power, and in so doing they limit it.

“These forms matter. In our system, public officials must not only do the right thing; they must do it in the right way. Good intentions that run roughshod over institutional limits are abuses of power.”

So, all parties, both the House the Senate in Congress and the President, are unable to do the job of governing, then what?

Another columnist, Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post, got is just right the other day.

“We have reached a moment of intellectual and moral exhaustion for both major political parties. One is dominated by ethnic politics — which a disturbingly strong majority of Republican regulars have found appealing or acceptable. The other is dominated by identity politics — a movement that counts a growing number of Robespierres. Both seem united only in their resentment of the international economic order that America has built and led for 70 years.”

So, what should we wish for? Gerson says “it is a measure of our moment that this (the answer) is not obvious.”

For me, one answer is to form a third party, one that does not practice the Republican art of “ethnic politics” nor practice the Democrat art of “identity politics.”

It would be a party of the middle ground, one that accepts Constitutional norms and looks for what I call the “smart middle.”

Tough to do? Yes.

Possible? Perhaps, given the excesses of the current two party system.

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 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 a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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.

One of the toughest government jobs these days is the one former Army General John Kelly holds in Washington, D.C.

He is chief of staff to a person, President Donald Trump, who has no chief other than his own ego.

So, the media watches Kelly and looks for any misstep in his work. One of those alleged missteps occurred when Kelly, in a Fox News interview, called Confederate General Robert E. Lee an “honorable man.”

He also observed that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had made them stand.”

Despite a crescendo of media criticism – how could an official call a slave owner honorable – Kelly got it right. Facts, not perceptions, tell that story.

In a piece for the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Jay Winik, author of “April 1865” and “1944” and historian-in-residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, did everyone a service by providing a list of facts to buttress the image of Lee, not to mention Kelly’s comments.

Here is the list, with all due credit to Winik, from whom I quote:

• Lee’s lineage was impeccable. His father was Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee III, the celebrated Revolutionary War general and close friend of George Washington. Lee himself descended from two signers of the Declaration of Independence, and his wife, who later became an ardent Confederate, was none other than Mary Custis, a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and, through adoption, of George Washington himself.
• Lee agonized over whether to fight for the Confederacy. As war loomed, Abraham Lincoln offered him command of the new Union Army, a position he had always coveted. Despite being an avowed Federalist who longed for compromise to save the Union, Lee, like so many others, gave in to the permanency of birth and blood. “I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children,” he wrote a friend, “save in defense of my native state.” Instead he became the commanding general of the Confederate armies, while predicting that the country would pass “through a terrible ordeal.” He was right.
• Still, he was never much of a hater. Like Lincoln, more often than not Lee called the other side “those people,” rather than “the enemy.” Nor was it clear that he loved war itself. “It is well that war is so terrible,” he once said, “or we should grow too fond of it.” With words that could have been uttered by Lincoln, Lee talked of the cruelty of war, how it filled “our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.”
• Nor was he fond of slavery, once describing it as “a moral and political evil.” True, he did benefit from slavery. But in 1863, one day after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Lee went a step further than Thomas Jefferson ever did and freed his family slaves, fulfilling the wishes of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis. And in 1865, as the Confederacy stood on the throes of destruction, Lee supported a dramatic measure to put slaves in uniform and train them to fight, which would have effectively emancipated them.
• Upon the conflict’s close, Lee gave a forceful interview to the New York Herald in which he strongly condemned Lincoln’s assassination and claimed that the “best men of the South” had long wanted to see slavery’s end. Later he declared, “I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.”
• Arguably his most powerful statement about race relations came at war’s end in St. Paul’s Church, the congregation of the Richmond elite. To the horror of many of the congregants, a well-dressed black man advanced to take communion, and knelt down at the altar rail. The minister froze, unsure what to do. Lee knelt down next to the black man to partake of the communion with him.
• Finally, Lee’s greatest legacy was not in war, but in peace. Lee went to great pains to heal the bitterness that cleaved the country after Appomattox. When Lee surrendered to Ulysses S.

Winik’s conclusion was that Lee “embodied in countless ways the poignancy and tragedy of Civil War.”

So, it was right for Kelly to compliment Lee. Based on the facts, not the perceptions, of Lee’s life, he was a patriot who opposed slavery even though, for reasons of place and birth n the South, he fought for the Confederacy.

Facts vindicate Kelly.

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 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 a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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.

Under this headline – “OSAA reclassification recommendation makes no sense to valley league” – Salem Statesman-Journal editorial writers got it right the other day.

Making Salem area teams play three high schools in Bend and mandating the reverse will force students to make an often-dangerous trip over the Santiam Pass during the height of winter. It also will squeeze out valuable class time, which ought to be the main purpose of high school.

OSAA is an acronym that stands for Oregon School Activities Association, so I guess the great minds there thought it made sense to mandate the unconscionable trip.

No matter about dangerous driving conditions.

No matter about how much it would cost citizens in Salem and Bend to fund the increased expenses.

No matter about the fact that students would be gone from school for far longer than normal.

So, that’s why I say it was a stupid decision, one that is almost unfathomable to have been made by officials who should have the students’ best interests at heart.

Here’s more detail from the Statesman-Journal:

“The Oregon Schools Activities Association is messing with students’ academic careers. Again.

“The committee wants five of Salem-Keizer’s high schools to participate in athletic and other activities with three Bend schools starting next fall.

“Does no one remember the students who had to be tutored or flunked classes or failed to graduate when the OSAA implemented this same over-the-pass plan more than a decade ago by putting Salem in the same classification as Redmond?

“There are too many parents in the Salem-Keizer area who haven’t forgotten the impact the extra travel then had on their children’s studies. They’re still talking about it.”

So, imagine school buses already lumbering down roads; during snowy days or slowing to a crawl in the darkness of the return trip to avoid ice. The students would arrive back at their high schools late. It could be 11 p.m. or later if a baseball game went into extra innings, for instance. That meant students were pulling 15-hour days, and not all of them did their homework after three hours on the diamond. Imagine valley and high desert teams doing this multiple times per week.

So, it’s time for smarter heads at the OSAA to think again, even if the time for public comment has expired. If nothing else, OSAA officials should keep two principles in mind – the safety of the kids involved in athletics and the fact that athletics should not usurp academics.

As a sports fan, one who has watched his kids and grandkids grow up while combining school and sports, there is a better way to proceed that what the OSAA has chosen.

Our children deserve much better!

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 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 a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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.

After watching the to’ing and fro’ing in the Nation’s Capitol this week, I find myself wishing for a bit of the old order of politics.

That would be the time when Republicans and Democrats would disagree by day on major policy issues, then agree by evening, often over a glass of wine.

It was an illustration of the old political saw: They knew how to disagree agreeably.

No longer.

Now we have one side going after the other as if there was no tomorrow.

Enter the “Russian issue.”

There is ample evidence to suggest that both Republican and Democrat operatives sought dirt from Russians to throw on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Charges against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, plus a guilty plea from George Papadopoulous, are only the first steps down an unclear path being charted by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Could the steps lead to Trump’s door? Probably.

Could they lead to Clinton’s door? Who knows?

One commentator I read, perhaps in response to charges that Facebook had posted, probably haphazardly, Russian ads during the presidential campaign, said he couldn’t imagine how Facebook ads could change the character of a national election in this country.

Plus, the commentator raised questions about whether Russia, with all of its internal problems that threaten the reign of Vladimir Putin, could have believed it could skew the U.S. escalation, even as hard as it tried to do so.

Further, Don Levin, a post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie-Mellon University, makes three contentions about Russian interference.

First, he says covert interventions are much less effective than overt ones. “Covert interventions are more limited in the amount of assistance they can provide because of the need for operational secrecy. So in this case, the choice of a covert intervention by Russia weakens its effects.”

Second, Levin says electoral interventions by major powers in U.S. presidential elections have historically been ineffective or counterproductive. “John Adams still won the presidential election of 1796, and the backlash against the intervention led him to gain more Electoral College votes than he lost.

“Likewise, historians who studied later interventions in U.S. elections in 1940, 1948 and 1984 generally concluded that none had any significant effects on these elections.

Third, Levin says that, once interventions have been partly exposed, they are likely to be even less successful than they would have been had they proceeded in secret.

Is Mr. Levin right? Again, who knows ?

My concern is that the current skirmishes in Washington, D.C. shield what should be a spirited debate about tax reform. Not a debate that benefits one party or the other in the prelude to mid-term elections.

But, rather, a debate that focuses on how tax reform would affect taxpayers and businesses in this country.

That’s where our emphasis should be, but I suspect in the coming days and weeks we’ll be seeing more of Russia on our front pages and airwaves than tax reform principles.

Footnote: Speaking of tax reform, editorial from the Wall Street Journal this week contained this sage bit of advice – and this is the kind of debate we should be able to watch in Washington, D.C.

“The GOP tax blueprint released earlier this fall called for an unspecified expansion of the child tax credit, which now is $1,000 a child. But Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee are demanding that the credit “be at least doubled” and apply against payroll taxes. This would be bad tax policy and politics.

“Tax credits for kids—what’s not to like? The answer is obvious if you step back and consider the purpose of a tax code. The goal should be to raise the money needed to fund the government with the least amount of economic distortion.

“The simplest system is also the fairest and the most efficient. Politicians who want to promote social policies can do so via spending or regulation, but when they lace the tax code with special favors they force tax rates higher and reduce economic growth. To benefit from these tax favors, Americans must also behave in ways that politicians require—like buying a Tesla—but are not the best for the economy. The point of reform is to return to the first tax principles of raising money with the least amount of political meddling.”

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 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 a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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.

Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, not one of my favorites, but a good writer, tapped out a decent piece the other day under the headline, “With both parties in crisis, turmoil is the new normal.”

He’s right.

Turmoil is the new normal.  Democrats appear to hate Republicans. Republicans appear to hate Democrats. And, we have a president who appears to hate anyone who doesn’t agree that HE is the answer to every problem, though, frankly, he has few answers himself.

But, what caught my eye in Robinson’s column was this paragraph:

“We have a mental image of the political spectrum. On the right, there is the Republican Party with a set of conservative policies – cut taxes, shrink government, limit entitlements, deregulate, etc. On the left, there is the Democratic Party with a set of liberal policies – expand health care, raise wages, regulate Wall Street, promote fairness, and so on.

I’ll indicate my bias – yes, I have one, if not more, after 40 years in the public policy business – by saying that I think Robinson has a decent description of several Republican, conservative principles, but he errs with the Democrats.

Here’s how.

• Many Republicans want to expand health care, too, though with more individual freedom and private sector involvement than supported by Democrats.
• Many Republicans want to raise wages, though with fewer payoff to unions.
• Many Republicans want to regulate Wall Street, though without assuming that anyone on the Street is a crook.
• And, in the most important distinction, many Republicans want fairness…not just Democrats.

Now, I know Robinson is sick and tired of the erratic President Trump who doesn’t act like a nation’s chief executive. I am sick and tired, too.

But, rather than assume liberal Democrats are always right and conservative Republicans are always wrong, I hope that reasonable people on both sides – yes, there are some remaining – will find a way to seek the hallowed middle ground.

I say that as neither a Republican or a Democrat. I eschewed political labels about 10 years ago when I thought a lobbyist should hew to the middle, not either side

In that way, our country can return to a system of government based on finding compromise between and among competing views. That’s what real democracy is.

*****

Footnote: Robinson also uses the word Democratic to refer to one of the two parties in America’s two-party system of government. He’s probably right in his use of the word, but, as a form of personal protest, I decline to use the word Democratic. Intentionally, I leave off the last two letters…thus the word Democrat. I do so because, as I view them, either in Salem or Washington, D.C., Democrats are not democratic.

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 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 a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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.

As I ask the question in the headline, you may say, “Well, this guy has too much time on his hands!”

Yes, in retirement, I have nothing better to do than ponder questions like this.  Well, not really because, as the intro to this blog says, golf is on my agenda.

And the question takes on even more credibility as some of are glued to the World Series, which is the time when I tend to watch baseball on TV.

The managers in this case – Dave Roberts for the Dodgers and A.J. Grinch for the Astros – are decked out in uniforms as if they intend to play. They won’t and don’t. Still, they wear playing uniforms.

But, imagine if pro football coaches dressed up in football gear, including shoulder pads, leg protections and helmets! Stupid.

Or, if professional hockey coaches came to the bench in hockey protective gear.

Or, if pro basketball coaches wore baggy shorts and shirts without sleeves.

If any of this occurred, we’d be asking why.

But, with baseball, it’s different.

We accept that managers like Roberts and Grinch will get dressed up to play, then not play.

From exhaustive research on the subject – another indication that I have too much time on my hands — all I can determine is that the answer is rooted in the history of baseball.

For inquiring minds like mine, that is not enough.

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 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 a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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 question in the headline has been posed in the aftermath of the Arizona senator’s decision not to run for another term. He did so by taking to the Senate floor to launch stinging criticism of President Donald Trump.

My view is that Flake, whom I don’t know personally and have never lobbied, is a winner.

He stood up for ethics and principle, giving up a return to his Senate seat in the process. And he said what many of us have been thinking as we have watched Trump demean the presidency and engage in conduct that only be described as self-centered and narcissistic.

Now, of course, there will be those who say that Flake took the easy way out because he was likely to lose a bid for re-election, even in the Republican primary.

According to the Washington Post, recent polls in Arizona found Flake trailing the Democrat’s likely Senate nominee, Representative Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, as well as potential primary challengers.

Flake’s surprise announcement this week came just minutes after Trump left the Capitol following a rare luncheon with GOP senators and hours after Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) reignited a weeks-long feud with the president over Trump’s temperament.

From the Post: “In an unannounced Senate floor speech Tuesday to explain his decision, Flake excoriated Trump without using his name, delivering an address that was a call to arms to like-minded conservatives and a distress call to the nation.

“We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that this is just the way things are now, Flake said.  “If we simply become used to this condition, thinking that it is just politics as usual, then heaven help us. Without fear of the consequences and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe, we must stop pretending that the conduct of some in our executive branch is normal. It is not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused as telling it like it is when it is actually reckless, outrageous and undignified.”

Flake’s speech came on top of concerns and criticisms leveled in recent days by former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who also pointed to the coarse nature of the nation’s politics and the character of current leaders — subtle, indirect but indisputable commentaries on Trump.

Flake also has criticized many Republicans, who, he says, have adopted the “belief or the principle that you spend money to get elected. Staying in office, staying in power, has come to overwhelm everything.”

My view, from the cheap seats out West, is that Flake’s action was honorable. He couldn’t live with the current political environment, especially with Trump at the helm, so decided to step aside and, in the private sector, he will have even more chance to criticize Trump and the current Washington, D.C. without fear of political consequences for his home state, Arizona.

Would he have won re-election? We’ll never know. But what we do know is that Senator Flake delivered a solid and telling postscript to his six years in Washington, D.C. He said he would not continue to tolerate the loss of civility in politics in the Nation’s Capitol and, for that matter, I add, in the country at large.

In that way, Flake’s action recalled for me one of my favorite quotes from a past national leader, General Colin Powell…when he said he would not run for president, he “bemoaned the loss of civility in politics.”

That was more than 10 years ago.  Imagine what the general would say now with the continuing slide downhill in our national politics.

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 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 a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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 Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering, one of two which I direct (the other is the Department of Pet Peeves), is open again.

This has to be the case because there has been a lot of good material lately, especially in the Wall Street Journal, my favorite newspaper these days.

As director, I have full and complete authority to decide which quotes are worth remembering. There is no advisory committee. There is no second-in-command, with partial authority. There is only me.

So, here goes.

From Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan: “One reason (that Trump may follow Sarah Palin into oblivion) is that there is no hard constituency in America for political incompetence, and that is what he continues to demonstrate. The first sign of political competence is knowing where you stand with the people. He proceeds each day with the confidence of one who thinks his foundation firm when it’s not—it’s shaky. His job is to build support, win people over through persuasion, and score some legislative victories that will encourage a public sense that he is competent, even talented.

“The story of this presidency so far is his inability to do this. He thwarts himself daily with his dramas. In the thwarting he does something unusual: He gives his own supporters no cover. They back him at some personal cost, in workplace conversations and at family gatherings. They are in a hard position. He leaves them exposed by indulging whatever desire seizes him—to lash out, to insult, to say bizarre things. If he acted in a peaceful and constructive way, he would give his people cover.”

Comment: Noonan accurately skewers Trump with this quote: “There is no hard constituency in America for political incompetence.” Good point.

From the Wall Street Journal editorial page:  “Hyperventilating is the modern political default, starting with the President of the United States. But the political flap over the Senate’s ‘blue slip’ courtesy for judicial nominees is even phonier than usual.  The tradition—it isn’t a formal rule—has allowed a home-state senator of either party to signal opposition to a lower-court nominee by refusing to return a sheet of paper known as the blue slip. The tradition was intended to give Senators a chance to flag a particular problem with a nominee that others might not know about, but it was never intended as an ideological pocket veto.”

Comment: The first sentence is what caught my eye here – “hyperventilating is the modern political default.” Of course, the president is the first culprit. All he does is hyperventilate without any apparent plan to solve any of the nation’s problems. But I also thought of New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democrat leader in the Senate. He also is chronic hyperventilator.

From a piece by Karl Rove in the WSJ under the headline, “Trump, Corker and the Circular Firing Squad:”  “The feud started more than a week ago , when Senator Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) told a reporter that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly are ‘people that help separate our country from chaos.’

“What good did that do?

“The Tennessee senator was correct when he added that these men ‘work very well together to make sure the policies we put forth around the world are sound and coherent.’ But his first remark made them look bigger and saner than Donald Trump. The president hates that: Advisers who are portrayed that way tend to lose influence and, sometimes, their jobs.

“Mr. Trump responded, unsurprisingly, with a Twitter assault. ‘Bob Corker ‘begged’ me to endorse him for re-election,’ the president wrote. ‘I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out.’ Mr. Trump also said he expected Mr. Corker to ‘stand in the way of our great agenda,’ and that the senator ‘didn’t have the guts to run!’

“What good came from this?”

Comment: The answer, of course, is nothing. While I could applaud Corker for saying what many other colleagues thought – not to mention what I thought — his point only prompted a tirade, call it hyperventilating, from Trump. Nobody won anything.

Again, from Peggy Noonan in the WSJ:  “In early March I met with a dozen Republican U.S. senators for coffee as part of a series in which they invite writers, columnists and historians to share what’s on their mind. The consuming topic was the new president. I wrote some notes on the train down, seized by what I felt was the central challenge Republicans on Capitol Hill were facing. The meeting was off the record, but I think I can share what I said. I said the terrible irony of the 2016 campaign was that Donald Trump was the only one of the 17 GOP primary candidates who could have gone on to win the presidency. Only he had the uniqueness, the outside-the-box-ness to win. At the same time Mr. Trump was probably the only one of the 17 who would not be able to govern, for reasons of temperament, political inexperience and essential nature. It just wouldn’t work. The challenge for Republicans was to make legislative progress within that context.”

Comment: Trump gives supporters and those who should be his allies in Congress no support – or room to hide. He cashes in all his potential support and for what? Just his latest tweet tirade.

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 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 a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and 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.

In one of my recent blogs, I wrote that, in trying to understand national politics from my home in Oregon, I often reviewed various newspapers, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

With those papers, I would tend to get, respectively, the left and the right.

This was absolutely true this week as the Times wrote an editorial lauding the health care compromise work being done by Senators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray. Perhaps predictably, the Journal slammed the work as not being balanced between Republican and Democrat aims.

Go no further than these two paragraphs:

From the New York Times: “…the Alexander-Murray deal represents real progress. These two no-nonsense lawmakers — the leading Republican and Democrat on the Senate health committee — have done yeoman’s work trying to fix a mess created largely by Mr. Trump. Their bill would appropriate money for payments to insurance companies that the president said he was stopping last week. He said they amounted to an illegal corporate bailout — a blatant lie. These payments, authorized by the A.C.A., or Obamacare, compensate insurers for lowering the deductibles and co-payments for low-income families. Further, Mr. Alexander and Ms. Murray would require the administration to spend $106 million on advertising and on people to help people sign up for insurance when open enrollment begins on Nov. 1. Mr. Trump’s minions at the Department of Health and Human Services slashed spending on outreach efforts in recent months.

From the Wall Street Journal: “How does Washington define “bipartisan”? We are about to find out if it means that Republicans surrender to everything Democrats want, or if it means a genuine trade of policy priorities in which both sides get something and the country benefits.

“That’s the question to ask about this week’s deal between Republican Lamar Alexander and Democrat Patty Murray to appropriate two years of funding for Obama Care’s ‘cost-sharing’ reductions that flow to insurers. The Trump Administration last week cut off these subsidies, which the Obama Administration paid without an appropriation from Congress. A federal judge ruled last year that those payments are illegal. Democrats would also get about $100 million for advertising ObamaCare.

“In sum, Democrats get what they care most about in politics: More to spend. And the structure of ObamaCare survives.”

So, which is the right view – the Times or the Journal?

Who knows, but probably neither.

One fact is that, if legislators in Oregon or Members of Congress in Washington, D.C., try to find middle ground, the first proposal out of the box rarely is the final word.

Other than the drafters propose amendments in one direction or the other. In this case in D.C., President Donald Trump, who wouldn’t know a good health care bill if he saw it, went both ways. First, he said he would support the effort, lauding both Alexander and Murray. A day or so later, he said, no, the effort wasn’t worth anything and he would oppose it.

I hope reasonable elected officials on both the right and the left – yes, there are a few remaining – will work hard to find the best middle ground on health care. I believe it exists. In many ways, I care less about the details and more about the process that produces a result.

We – and they – are facing a checkered history. First, President Barack Obama worked only with Democrats to enact a new federal entitlement, which has been almost impossible to remove or limit. Then, more recently, Republicans worked only with themselves to proposing repealing and replacing ObamaCare.

Neither effort represented good public policy. Perhaps Alexander and Murray can revise their first effort to gather the requisite number of votes and move this country forward on heath care.