A candidate’s past is fair game. In a republic, we must vote for people based on our perceptions of their character and judgment, because they will inevitably deal with problems they didn’t anticipate when they were running for office and promising everyone the moon. Philosophy and policy preference are important, too, of course, but how our public officials act can have a huge impact on policy (and electability) in the end.

This has been true for as long as voting has existed. So why are we so bad at using candidates’ history to properly evaluate them? Why do we focus on the wrong things, or so often completely miss the real relevance of what we sometimes learn about the youth of our political leaders?

I thought about that a lot as news broke that attorney general candidate Aaron Ford has some minor criminal history from a quarter century ago. Some of Ford’s opponents have been trying to stoke that up into something more than it is, because once you’ve been put in handcuffs, you’re apparently irretrievably stained for life.

I think most people who aren’t hard-core partisan tribalists understand how silly this really is.

When Ford was in college in the early ‘90s, he was arrested for public intoxication on campus, again for letting a speeding ticket go to warrant for (I assume) forgetting to pay the ticket, and then one more time for failing to pay for a new tire, and then again for failing to appear for that court date. The theft charges were later dropped when he paid restitution to the shop owner. After that, by all accounts, he got his act together and ultimately became a prominent and (politician and lawyer jokes aside) productive member of civil society.

Isn’t that what we want? As a conservative, I love bootstrap, beating-the-odds stories like that. They inspire me, and serve as a reminder of what an amazing country we live in. For the more religiously inclined, such a tale of lost and found and redemption should warm hearts and affirm faiths.

Ford calls any discussion of those old arrests “illegitimate,” and he’s wrong about that. The arrest history of public officials is fair to consider, especially when the elected position sought is related to law enforcement, and the fact that he doesn’t seem to understand this speaks somewhat poorly about his judgment today. It’s also a baffling position to take, as is the lateness of these revelations with respect to his political career. If I were him, that “stupid kid grows into responsible adult” character arc would have been part of my personal political mythos and narrative from day one.

I have been extremely critical of Mr. Ford in this space. As the Senate majority leader, he was overly partisan and ineffective as a result. His voting record suggests he is someone who does not understand that the primary purpose of our criminal justice system is public safety, and that any criminal justice reform efforts must be undertaken with that primary goal in mind, lest those efforts backfire dangerously in our communities. I do not trust him to protect constitutional rights or the rule of law. I am frustrated by people who would advocate for higher taxes and then chronically underpay their own. And I suspect that he would see his role as AG as something supervisory and adversarial to local law enforcement agencies, which would serve to undermine effective law enforcement teamwork in this state.

Those are the issues worth discussing about candidate Aaron Ford. But if the best his opponents can muster is, “he got busted for drinking too much when he was a sophomore,” then they will have proven themselves small, petty, and not worthy of the debate — or of public trust themselves.

A candidate’s past is fair game, including the stupid stuff we do when we’re young. And really, that’s true of anyone. But what’s not fair – or smart, if you really want to know a person – is looking at singular events in a vacuum, while deliberately failing to see how that person has grown and learned from the experience.

Unfair attacks on the youth of political candidates is nothing new, of course, and the temptation to engage in it is bipartisan and at least as old as democracy itself. But as we become more and more polarized in our politics, these sort of gotcha campaign strategies only further poisons and stupefies our political culture — and distracts from necessary policy discussions.

Whatever my political disagreements with Mr. Ford, I respect his younger self’s choice to grow and learn and change and mature. If he becomes AG, I hope he will dip back into the well of those better traits, rather than simply becoming another calcified partisan tribalist. I think his story is an important one to tell, and one that can inspire thousands of young men and women who might be tempted to give up on their lives, dreams, and ambitions after a few early setbacks.

Showing grace and understanding to our political opponents is a powerful and critical way for us to heal and keep healthy in our society. It’s also, in the end, a more effective way to run for office, at least if you really care about policy, or working with those same opponents after the election, as will inevitably happen.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a deputy district attorney for Carson City. His opinions here are his own. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].