Charlene Albarran shouldn’t make me hopeful, should she?

I met Charlene Albarran on Wednesday at a local coffee house, and she made me more hopeful than I wanted to be. In fact, it was downright uncomfortable. I’ve grown nearly apathetic about politics in our state, beaten into submission by the oppressiveness of it all.

Then I met Charlene. Her candidacy threatens to rouse me from my stupor. Charlene is challenging Chris Stewart, the Republican incumbent for the U.S. house seat from Utah’s second district. And I hope, desperately so, that she has a chance.

She’s a woman — an attractive one at that — and a Democrat, and she says she wants to give voice to those who aren’t represented at all, or are underrepresented at best. I buy that. I get that. She was drawn into the political arena last summer because she didn’t like what she was hearing from the national candidates. I buy that. I get that, too.

But what I might be buying, the voting majority here may not. She’s a woman, and she’s a Democrat. And she is ready to challenge the status quo, gridlock and all, at the national level. These are not qualities the majority voters seem to want their national representatives to possess.

I’ve observed the political scene from my vantage point in southwestern Utah for over seven years, and here is what I hope for a candidate like Charlene: I hope she possesses the pitch-perfect mix of naivete and deftness to recognize what she doesn’t know. The naivete will come in handy when she is confronted with the hailstorm of senseless minutia that gets thrown around in the name of historical preference in these parts. The deftness she will need to peel off from the maelstrom that which is meaningful in understanding not just what Dixie was but what Dixie is today and could become.

She talks of standing up for all of us, and I hope that by “all of us” Charlene is referring to many of us who wonder if our national representatives come from a different planet than we do. Frequently, when I hear Orrin Hatch opining on one thing or another, I wonder if he’s even knows that people who hold differing views are growing in numbers in the state he represents. I have similar reactions when Mike Lee steps up to the microphone. When they use phrases like, “I speak for the people of this country,” or “My constituents want …” this constituent screams back at her HD images, “Are you crazy? You have no idea what I want!” Not only do I feel unrepresented, I am often embarrassed to admit that these are “my guys.”

Charlene is running against Chris Stewart, a first-term incumbent. In all honesty, I had to look that up. Chris Stewart is not a name with whom I associate my representation in Washington.

Here’s what I learned through a brief scan of Rep. Stewart’s website. He disagrees with President Obama’s plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Rather than explaining his disagreement, however, Stewart labels the president as delusional and accuses Obama of placing “left wing politics” before national security.

Calling names is childish and partisan. Our country can’t afford childishness. Or partisanship. Charlene says that she will work across the aisle and evaluate issues on their merits regardless of which party supports them. That would be refreshing.

Stewart also seems to be aligning himself with those who would wrest control of federal lands from the U.S. government and return it to “local control.” There is a small but not inconceivable chance that such a position wouldn’t be a black mark against Stewart, unless one looks at the source of his campaign financing in 2014. There, it is hard to miss how prominently the oil and gas industry figured into Stewart’s successful bid for Congress. Money talks. Charlene claims to speak for those of us who have voices but not deep pockets to buy the megaphones. That, too, would be refreshing.

So what does Charlene have going for her? After our chat, I can say this. She’s smart. She’s thoughtful. She doesn’t spew canned answers. She pauses. She thinks through what she is about to say. Despite the obvious, she doesn’t think this campaign is an uphill battle. Rather, she sees her campaign as an opportunity to offer the voters in District 2 an alternative to the current state of lopsided representation.

She wants to speak for the people of color and creed who are underrepresented. She wants to reach out especially  to the LGBTQ and the Hispanic communities.

She says she knows who she is and that she is sure of herself. I hope so. She is going to need that surety when she faces the machine that is politics in Southern Utah.

She feels strongly that we need to cease splitting groups off and bring the people within those groups together.

When we met the other day, Charlene and I didn’t talk specific issues. I didn’t throw hardball questions at her, and her answers were more about her ideals than her specifics. Rather, I wanted to get a sense of who she is as a person.

To the extent that such a surface can be scratched in less than an hour in a coffeehouse at the end of a busy day for her, I came away with these impressions.

She may be a beginner at the political game, but she seems to be going in with her eyes wide open and her spine straightened and stiff. She talks of wanting to represent all of us, or at least as many of us as she can, particularly those who haven’t had the luxury of a spokesperson on the national scene, at least from Utah, for a very long time. She says she wants to be a voice of common sense or negotiation and of compromise.

And damn it, Charlene Albarran made me hopeful.