Let’s abjure the ridiculous and embrace the real

Standing on the narrow strip of concrete in the middle of the street between the Trump Tower and the Fashion Show mall in the hot Las Vegas summer sun, I finally had enough.

After a Fox News reporter asked Democratic presidential candidate and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley about Donald Trump's fame and Hillary Clinton's emails, I felt compelled to break in with a question about the governor's immigration policy.

O'Malley mostly dodged it, and a follow-up, as politicians are wont to do. But at least he was suddenly talking about something real. And that, in our modern political environment, is progress.

A political newsletter published by The Washington Post recently led off with an account of the latest in the Clinton email scandal. It followed that up with the lamentable news that most people don't know where Clinton stands on issues such as fracking, the Keystone XL pipeline and breaking up the big banks.

The hell you say. Why could that possibly be?

Let's not excuse Clinton: She erred seriously by not simply using a government-issued, secure smartphone while serving as secretary of state, and she's only made the situation worse in how she's reacted to questions about her private email server. She may be guilty of mishandling classified information, and she will have to face those legitimate questions.

But what possible relevance could there be in asking O'Malley about Clinton's problems? How would his answer address a single real problem faced by a voter, as opposed to simply generating a raucous headline to "win" the next hour of cable news ratings?

What's next? Will respected newspapers start asking about people's hair?

Too late: Writing for The New York Times Magazine, blogger Ana Marie Cox uncorked a question to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders about the relative attention paid to his hair versus Clinton's. Even worse, when Sanders understandably asked if she was serious, Cox tried to defend the question as legitimate.

Sanders' response was understated: "When the media worries about what Hillary's hair looks like or what my hair looks like, that's a real problem," Sanders replied. "We have millions of people who are struggling to keep their heads above water, who want to know what candidates can do to improve their lives, and the media will very often spend more time worrying about hair than the fact that we're the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people."

If there's any faint praise for Cox and her editors, it's that they published that part of the exchange in the all-too-brief interview with Sanders.

There is no shortage in this country of politicians who would love nothing more than to distract the public with meaningless claptrap in order to avoid a straight-up discussion on actual policy. And there's no shortage of people in my profession who will more than happily let them do it, in exchange for big audience numbers.

But that has to stop. We — all of us — have got to shift our attention from the ridiculous to the real, where the depredations and outrages are so much more compelling than chasing a new shiny object from minute-to-minute. One of those candidates visiting Las Vegas, searching for supporters and votes, will eventually be elected president; we owe it to ourselves to take advantage of their presence to question them closely enough to find out which one will actually improve the lives of regular Americans.

I admit, that's harder and takes a lot more work, and I've fallen short of doing that many times myself. But since we're standing out there in the hot sun anyway, we might as well get something worthwhile out of it.

--Steve Sebelius is a Las Vegas Review-Journal political columnist. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at 702-387-5276 or ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.