The other night, I was at a fundraiser for Jim Himes who is running for Congress in Connecticut’s Fourth Congressional District. After the event, we were talking about his speech and some of the issues of the day, such as education and immigration. Part way through the discussion he asked if I had ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I was surprised at his question, since I am in the middle of rereading it. I wondered later if he had seen me reading it, read a blog post I’ve written recently about it, or if someone else had suggested he ask me about it. At some point, we’ll get together and talk about some of my thoughts about how it applies to campaigns.

I had recently read the section where Pirsig asked his class to write an essay defining quality. The class became outraged and indignant when they found out that Pirsig didn’t have a good definition of quality and was hoping that someone in the class would come up with a good definition. It made me sit back and think. What would it be like if a candidate admitted he didn’t have all the answers and asked his constituents to help him find solutions to the problems our nation faces? Most people suggest that such an approach would be political suicide. There would be similar outrage and indignation as Pirsig’s students expressed, but unlike a required English course, the voters would probably drop the candidate pretty quickly.

Nonetheless, it seems a laudable goal, to find politicians that admit they don’t know it all and are willing to learn from their constituents, for I do believe that there are a lot of smart constituents that are not involved in the political process, either as activists or lobbyists. I do think that citizen councils could bring a lot of valuable new ideas to the political process.

Yet this would require a special sort of politician, one who is more interested in solving our countries problems than simply being an elected official, and who could still get elected nonetheless.

I’ve often wondered how any of our current politicians would stand up. There are only a few that I think could stand the test. If Gore were asked if he would rather be President or see an end to global warming, I bet he would chose an end to global warming. If Edwards was asked if he would rather be President or see an end to poverty, I think he would chose an end to poverty. If Kucinich were asked if he would rather be President or would want to see World Peace, I suspect he would quickly choose World Peace. I’m just not sure about any of the other candidates, or what various people in races further down the ticket would say.

In our current political climate there doesn’t seem to be much room for idealists or philosophers. Perhaps one day, that will change, but until then, I keep most of my philosophical questions reserved for the blogs.