Thirty-Somethings Come of Political Age : Politics: When a contemporary runs for Congress, a whole generation is forced to grow up.

Sue and I are sprawled on the old orange corduroy sofas, still grungy from our camping trip when Tom finally gets home. He navigates easily through the toys and puzzles and piles of camping gear his wife and I have just dragged in, and plunders the kitchen for dinner, which today will be a cucumber, two carrots, a pear, cheese curds and zucchini bread.

He kisses his wife and drops beside me on the mushy couch. The comfortable disarray feels like old times.

Tom has always had boundless energy, and despite a long day’s work, he is eager to talk, hearing the highlights of our camping trip, quizzing me on my own life, and then, as usual, slipping into politics.

Within a half hour, we are plowing through the minefields of welfare reform and U.S. policy in Haiti. It is the same sort of passionate political discussions that we have had for years, Tom and Sue and various others crowded on these very couches, talking out our plans for the world. But this time it is for real. Tom is running for Congress.

Although the campaign has been going on for more than a year, I’m still not used to the idea that a friend of mine, a contemporary with whom I have danced all night, flipped pancakes and moved furniture, could actually be helping to govern the country some day soon. It is hard to picture Tom at a state dinner after I have watched him at his kitchen table devouring a mixing bowl full of spaghetti, “carbo-loading” for a triathlon.

I mean, I know this guy. I dated his housemate. We had yard sales together. Being best friends with his then-girlfriend, (now wife and mother of a 2-year-old) I was privy to his every fault and transgression.

There is something unsettling about the idea of one’s contemporaries running for Congress. Was this always so? Did Eisenhower or Truman have old school buddies sitting around shaking their heads, saying, “Can you believe it? Do you remember what that bonehead did that time . . . “

Our generation, the thirty-somethings, have been notoriously reluctant to admit that we have grown up. The American people have always wanted wise, noble and (though loathe to admit it) somewhat paternalistic government. The horror of my generation now is that this government must come from us.

I had a hard time accepting Tom as a congressman, not because I know him to be unqualified but simply because I know him at all. And yet, Tom fits perfectly our classical ideal of a representative--intelligent and creative, of common birth and modest background.

Campaigning and politics, never pretty I’m sure, have become savage. Five or six appearances in one day, shaking hands, handing himself out in pamphlets. How can the people possibly know him? How does an ordinary person without millions to spend on a campaign even compete?

Tom is lucky. Wisconsin is still the sort of place where a campaign bicycle ride is respected. What happens to the Toms in California, Texas and New York?

Tom has already traded his Guatemalan shorts for blue shirts and khaki pants. How much more will he and his family have to change? Will Sue have to start wearing pantyhose every day? Will these couches have to go?

Can you even get elected with couches like these I wonder? They are horrid things, soft of spine and saggy of cushion, but still undeniably orange. These couches, hulking there like a dowager and her hunchback son, came from a friend’s group house, to my group house to Tom’s group house some 10 years ago.

But these couches are exactly why Tom should be elected. These couches are fiscal responsibility; living within a budget and choosing priorities for spending. These couches are family values; spending your money on frequent flights home to Grandma’s instead of on new furniture. These couches are substance over form, issue over rhetoric, tradition over speculation.

As we finally turn out the lights and go to bed, I feel this mix of awe and sadness and lovely fragile hope. In the dark, the couches look like battered old orange freight cars, freight cars loaded with dreams, ideals and responsibilities.

Now my only thought is, if Tom actually wins, will we have to move these things again?