In no way do I want to discount the hardships that Castro faced nor the significance of his accomplishments. But this is the story that we hear repeatedly from so many candidates running for office. It\u2019s as if Beaver Cleaver could never have run for office. Neither could anyone else in his family, or in his neighborhood, or in the world as he knew it. The same would be true for Ricky Nelson, or for the Cosby kids or virtually anybody who grew up in a semi-functional family which was not living paycheck-to-paycheck.<\/p>\n

There is a third category of \u201clife stories\u201d that does not involve the kind of hardships that a Juli\u00e1n Castro or Barack Obama faced or the idyllic life of fictional TV families. It is the lives that most people live, where a lot of things go well, and frequently \u201cshit happens.\u201d Sometimes that shit involves an absent parent, or a close family member with addiction problems. It might mean going to school with a learning disability which is never diagnosed. It might mean feeling bullied, even though that would be invisible to almost everyone else.<\/p>\n

It might be just the process of living a life in a very complicated world, where the pressures to succeed in school, in peer relationships, in the workforce, in child-rearing, and in navigating one\u2019s way through everyday challenges is frequently fraught with difficulty, as it is for most people.<\/p>\n

The people who live these lives have stories too. They may not include rags to riches or first generation-in-the-family accomplishments. But they are stories of lives that are difficult, because none of us has it easy. If we did, there would be no stories of privileged people who live in mental and emotional torment.<\/p>\n

I wish Juli\u00e1n Castro well in his campaign for president. But I want to know about his political positions, and even more importantly, how he might be different from so many of the failed office-holders we have in our world. How is he going to handle the insidious role of money in politics? How is he not going to talk down to voters? How is he going to make time to continue to study issues, all the while being there for his family and friends? Could he prepare himself to deal with the harshness of political battles better than Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton? Would he be able to add a little bit of Lyndon Johnson know-how of dealing with Congress to the tremendous strength of character that Barack Obama had?<\/p>\n

There is so much to know, and politics has a way of obscuring most of it. Mr. Castro, we\u2019ll give you a pass on the first speech, but now it\u2019s time to patronize us less and level with us more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is this what it\u2019s come to? Someone running for office must have a background story that is so gripping that we think that he or she came out of a Dickens novel. If the candidate can\u2019t wow the socks off voters with how compelling his or her \u201cwomb-to-candidacy\u201d story is, she might as well forget about running.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3027,3244,1575,16],"tags":[3355,3059,3354,3353],"yoast_head":"\n