POLITICS: Memo to candidates: Get serious

You might think a candidate for Congress would focus issues of import, such as runaway federal spending; Americans’ high cost of living; and paying TSA agents so Americans can resume normal air travel routines.

Nope.

Too often, we get stunts, pandering, platitudes, distractions, anti-Trump rage –– and priorities only a lunatic could love.

Can candidates for high office –– especially from deep-blue swaths of California –– please be serious for a minute or 10, and focus on practical solutions to real issues?

Take Saikat Chakrabarti, who’s running to replace the retiring San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi in Congress.

Chakrabarti drew attention this month not by addressing any serious issue facing his would-be constituents, but by promoting a video in which he is endorsed by drag queen “Peaches Christ.”

In the short clip, “Peaches” and the candidate say nothing discernible about the issues in the race.

“We need a disrupter,” Peaches says. “We need someone who’s not a politician.”

That’s about as deep as it gets. No word on how the millionaire candidate would disrupt anything, or to what end. Just a plea to vote for him –– and volunteer for his “grassroots” campaign.

We have no quibble with the endorsement, with drag queens, or even with having a little fun in campaigns.

The trouble is: Even the zaniest, deepest-blue swaths of California have serious business for would-be policymakers to address.

Stunts such as Chakrabarti’s address no trace of it.

Indeed, the contest to succeed Pelosi in California’s 11th Congressional District typifies a race to the bottom.

Chakrabarti, a former aide to Rep. AOC, is not the only misguided candidate in the race.

Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco and parts of San Mateo County in the state Senate, has a long record of impractical left-wing activism, from advocating “gender-affirming care” for minors to requiring large companies to publicize their carbon emission levels to obliging Caltrans to prioritize anything but cars on state-owned city streets.

In the stunt department, Wiener sponsored the “No Kings Act” to allow litigation against ICE and other federal agents for alleged constitutional violations; SB 747 passed the state Senate this year and pends in the Assembly.

Meanwhile, a third progressive candidate, Supervisor Connie Chan, supported defunding the police before retreating from that stance, opposed the (richly deserved) recall of far-left DA Chesa Boudin, and is running on a tired “green new deal” platform (i.e., virtue-signaling and gobs of green pork).

Is this group really the best the Dems have to offer?

Candidates would do well to treat congressional business seriously –– to offer real solutions to the very real crises facing California and the nation.

Enough with the stunts, the activism, and the platitudes.