What is in your past that would surface if you ran for politics?

At last count, after having been outed for offensive behavior mostly on social media, the Conservatives have lost three candidates, the Liberals have lost two, and the NDP have lost one.
 

Would you last as a candidate?

I think I would but … well … maybe not. I hearken my mind to parties in a park near my school when I was fifteen. There was beer. And, there was male teenage bravado coupled with mob mentality.  I am now embarrassed by things that were said 35 years ago. Specifically, our propensity to use racially pejorative terms in joke telling without really thinking about the hurtfulness of what we were saying and doing. There was nothing criminal or really awful. But, there was an ignorant world view that was expressed without tact or humour. 

So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. John 8:7.

Perhaps we should simply ignore youthful eruptions? 

Yes. We should. If that is was it is. And, as long as it’s within some boundary. Some youthful expressions can be forgiven because of ignorance. People do change. They grow, they mature, they change, and they redeem themselves. Other offensive moments in the past can’t be forgiven because, judged in context, they are simply too great an offense. 

And, it will be really hard to define this line in advance. It probably comes down to “I know it when I see it.”

From Wikipedia:

The phrase was famously used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio.^[1][2][3] In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.^[4]

The expression became one of the most famous phrases in the entire history of the Supreme Court.^[5] Though "I know it when I see it" is widely cited as Stewart's test for "obscenity", he never used the word "obscenity" himself in his short concurrence. He only stated that he knows what fits the "shorthand description" of "hard-core pornography" when he sees it.

Stewart's "I know it when I see it" standard was praised as "realistic and gallant"^[6] and an example of candor.^[7]