Kudos to Mayor Kevin Faulconer for meeting with President Donald Trump when he was in Washington recently.

We know that the mayor and President Trump are often on opposite sides, and I can’t imagine that a meeting between Mayor Faulconer and the president he didn’t endorse is easy-breezy with rainbows and sunshine everywhere like it is here in San Diego. And yet the mayor still met with Trump, because that’s what our leaders have to do. They have to talk with people even when they disagree with them. And during those meetings, they have to bring up issues that are important to their constituents.

Now given the history between these two leaders, I’m not surprised there were different accounts of what was said in this meeting. The president says the mayor thanked him for the wall; the mayor says he talked about homelessness, sewage, and trade.

And because human beings love to gossip and talk about political theater, we lose sight of the issues discussed in that meeting and instead talk about the personalities.

Here’s my take: if you forced me to choose between the two and believe who is telling the truth in this he-said/ he-said battle, I’d side with Kevin. There is plenty of evidence to support that viewpoint, even if I wasn’t physically in that meeting.

But to be fair to the President, he might have heard things differently. He doesn’t live here, and there are another 324 million Americans who do not live here. Maybe cognitive biases are to blame for why some folks think San Diego has only one issue — being overrun by illegal immigrants. We have many challenges, and some like homelessness have been highlighted nationally. Is it possible that folks see the pictures of the homeless camps and confuse that with an illegal immigration problem in San Diego? Probably.

So who’s telling the truth in all this? Trump or Faulconer? I don’t care, and neither should you. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” And when we talk about the meeting between these two, we’re talking about people. Not events; let alone ideas.

Here’s the most important part of the story. The mayor tried to highlight San Diego’s multiple challenges. And he took the time to meet with someone he disagrees with publicly, because he thought it would help him tackle those challenges. I give him credit. We have a lot of problems, and we need to prioritize.

We all know we have more than one problem to solve. What I call the lobbyist/ advocate class meet with our local leaders to push their respective concerns to the top of the agenda. And I’m part of that cadre, too; I focus exclusively on the problem of taxpayer efficiency. It’s human nature.

Yet it’s hard for us to prioritize because we in this class often spend more time talking about who knows whom, the relationships, how someone said something – the people, not the events, not the ideas.

The mayor had less than twenty minutes with the President, and we as a community only have so many hours in the day to meet and discuss issues ourselves. Whether they be the sewage and trade issues that the mayor brought up or the housing, homelessness, and behavioral health challenges we face, we have to pick and choose what we can work on together – and we shouldn’t talk about the people but rather the ideas.

At the core of it, the conflict between the mayor and the President was really about what they each prioritized in that meeting. The President was focused on the wall, border security, and illegal immigration; the mayor was focused on homelessness, sewage, and trade. We should be talking about whose priorities are more important and the substance of the ideas.

Let’s give Mayor Faulconer credit for talking with someone he doesn’t like and for trying to prioritize challenges that were not on the President’s agenda. And let’s not waste any more time obsessing over the personalities and the political drama when what we should be concerned about are ideas and solutions.

Give Credit Where It's Due