Any serious candidate for the Presidency is naturally going to have a record of leadership and decision-making. And no such record will ever be perfect. An opponent’s researcher will easily be able to find a flawed decision and dredge it up out of context so the media can grab right onto it. A decision may or may not have been a good one. The candidate may or may not have learned from it. Context may or may not be very important.

The reality is that it’s the big picture and the overall record that matters. The accumulated decisions of a leadership history can shine light on future decisions of the candidate. But we don’t get this in sound bites and one-minute statements.  Assessments we can trust are hard to find.

We saw this in the Kamala Harris/Joe Biden incident during the first Democratic debates. Lots of attention was given to the “fight” and the “attack,” and no context or nuance to help us understand a bigger picture