It’s a safe bet that Lois Capps is the only member of Congress to stage a campaign kickoff featuring quotations from Arthur Schopenhauer, the gloomy German philosopher who practically invented pessimism. Congressmember Capps celebrated the opening of her reelection headquarters with 150 of her closest friends last weekend, an event more notable for shout-outs to every liberal candidate and cause of the November agenda than for pleas to support the incumbent’s cruise control race for a sixth term.

Among the speakers was the Rev. Mark Asman, pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church, who urged opposition to Proposition 8, the ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage. Tracing the decline of intolerance toward gays in recent years, Rev. Asman appears to have made political history by becoming the first American ever to cite Schopenhauer (1788-1860) in a political campaign pitch: “Schopenhauer said that all truth goes through three stages,” he told the crowd stuffed into a hot De la Vina Street storefront on Saturday. “First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; finally, it is seen as self-evident.”

When Capps took the microphone to loud applause and adulation a few moments later, she quickly noted the obscure philosophical citation: “Hearing Mark, I couldn’t help but think about Walter,” she said softly. “If he was here … he would go off on Schopenhauer.”

As she paused to brush something from her eye, it was a bittersweet moment for the supporters surrounding Capps, who first won her 23rd Congressional District seat in 1998, five months after the sudden death of her husband, Walter. Many on hand worked that unlikely 1996 campaign of Walter Capps, an academic who, as a student, concentrated on the German philosophers and, as a UCSB professor, became a prominent author and teacher of religious studies, before turning to politics late in life: “Like his hero, Cincinnatus,” as one longtime UCSB supporter of Capps, husband and wife, put it.

It may have been an unlikely scene for a political rally anywhere else, but it was altogether appropriate for Santa Barbara, where Congressmember Capps stands at the center of the liberal Democratic establishment on issues (support for alternative energy sources, abortion rights, and the Measure A transportation tax, coupled with opposition to the Iraq War, offshore oil drilling, and the Proposition 8 gay marriage ban) and also personifies the civic values of civility, decency, and tolerance that her husband embodied (most of the time anyway: Capps at her rally uncharacteristically referred to her opponent as “a crazy guy”).

“We’re going to work with our hearts full of joy this time,” said Capps, clad in a red scarf, white pants, and blue top.

As a practical matter, her reelection actually may not take all that much labor. She’s running in a tailor-made Democratic district against little-known Republican Matt Kokkonen, a San Luis Obispo businessman whose platform is outlined in four You Tube videos on his Web site (mattforcongress.com), two of which weren’t working when I tried to watch them.

Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that Capps’s brief kickoff speech focused on the importance of electing Barack Obama president. In an interview afterward, she agreed with a local Obama campaign leader who had said that grassroots Democrats in California, where the ticket is expected to win easily, should volunteer to work in Nevada, a battleground state.

Interviewing Capps on national issues can be frustrating, sort of like trying to tackle pixie dust, as she consistently slides away from specifics. “The election is about ending a war and restoring our economy,” she said, sitting in a folding chair in the back of her headquarters after the rally. When pressed, she proved evasive, her answers resting more on rhetoric than on facts. Asked what the government should do about the mortgage crisis, for example, she said, “President Obama will take a series of steps … that show the government cares”; on energy policy, she “would be inclined to support” an energy independence plan that included an “all of the above” approach, including more offshore drilling; on Iraq, she backs a military withdrawal the “safest and fastest way possible,” but also wants more troops in Afghanistan. Asked about U.S. military ground forces entering Pakistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden or other terrorists, as Obama has suggested, Capps said, “I’d wait to see” what the president would propose.

At one point I asked her whether she agreed with Oprah’s decision not to invite GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on her show.

“Oh, that’s delicious,” Capps said. “What do you think she should do?”

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