In all his wit, Mark Twain once said, “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

Two months ago, when I first listened to Conor O’Hagan and Wyndham Manning pitch their candidacies for Dane County District 5 supervisor, I couldn’t help but indulge in Mr. Twain’s musings.

Were the two candidates akin to Tweedledee and Tweedledum? To Dumb and Dumber? No, not quite. Wyndham and Conor were just a couple of students who saw an opportunity in the open District 5 seat — one to pad his r?sum?, the other to pad his ego. (By the way, the election is on April Fools’ Day, truly the cherry on top of a fodder-filled dessert handed to us by the gods of irony.)

So I can understand from first-hand experience why many of you perceive this election as choosing between the lesser of two unqualified individuals. It’s the same sentiment I carped about after first hearing Wyndham talk about appealing to “the radicals in this town,” or after Mr. Hagan revealed one of his most pressing policy initiatives of — oh God, it still hurts to think about — renovating Vilas Zoo.

But if we truly feel this way, we have only ourselves to blame for not producing a more qualified candidate from the get-go, for deciding that stealing candy from a baby just wasn’t interesting enough. As Plato said, “The punishment of wise men who refuse to take part in the affairs of government is to live under the government of unwise men.” And all the signs that this would happen were right in front of us from the beginning.

From all accounts, Mr. O’Hagan’s campaign got its start by way of default — he was the only willing member of the College Democrats to run for the position and was essentially put in place by the chair of the organization. Don’t get me wrong; Mr. O’Hagan is a sincere guy, but then again, so was Jesse Ventura.

Wyndham on the other hand told me back in that first interview in January that his campaign got its start as a joke. He wanted to show other students that running for political office can be fun and easy, that you don’t have to be a political science major or a part of student government to consider public office. Then he realized he might actually have a chance to win and decided his campaign was for real.

So no wonder nearly everyone, including myself just paragraphs ago, has railed these two for not being serious candidates: Their campaigns started off as an experiment and a joke, respectively.

However, there’s reason to believe that not all hope is lost. As our current president would surely attest, you never know what will arise during your term in office. Indeed success as a politician may be more about one’s ability to learn as he goes, rather than where his candidacy begins. And the best indicator of a candidate’s potential ability to weather a steep learning curve is his ability to do so on the campaign trail. Here is where District 5 may find its glimmer of hope.

Tuesday, while listening to the two candidates make their new and improved pitches for office nearly three months after first interviewing them, I actually found myself relatively impressed by Mr. Manning’s command of certain issues, yet still severely depressed by Mr. O’Hagan’s near-insanity. Sure, Conor had dropped the zoo initiative, but in its place he revealed what he dubbed his “Dane County Economic Development Plan,” as if there were some 400-page PDF waiting to be downloaded from his website for any voter still on the fence wishing to sift through the intricacies of this grandiose plan.

In reality, it was a plan as humorous as it was infeasible, relying on everything from non-isthmus residents of the county ceasing to care about their well being, to the idea that all businesses can survive in a densely populated area if we simply will it so. I’m not sure, but there may have been talk of planting money trees.

Mr. Manning, on the other hand, no longer appeared to be joking around. His plan for improving the quality of lakes in the 5th District was supported by what appeared to be a thoroughly considered plan for manure digesters that would turn waste into fuel while keeping phosphorous and pathogens out of our lakes. He also asserted a well-considered plan for the future of county transportation that emphasized new rail systems over new highways.

While I certainly didn’t agree with him on many issues — especially not his absurd call for Dane County to be a haven for illegal immigrants as a means of increasing diversity — I actually found myself respecting him as a candidate.

So I guess that’s where we are: stuck with the choice between a candidate with no potential for sanity or relevance and a candidate who may learn on the quick, but may also act on the absurd.

God help us.

I guess it may be prudent to point out Mark Twain also once said that in politics, “people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”

I guess all I really know is that I’m gonna miss Ashok.

Andy Granias ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and philosophy.