oregon’s governor tries living on food stamps… would yours?

From today’s “New York Times“:

Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski’s decision to live on $3 a day in grocery money for a week, as he had been urged to do in an Oregon “food stamp challenge,” could confound the surest cynic. At 66, he was just elected to his second term, with a budget surplus surpassing $1 billion and a legislature controlled by his fellow Democrats. So just what was there to gain politically?

For a governor who has long pushed to reduce hunger and happens to like eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, maybe that was not the point…

More on the Oregon Food Stamp Challenge and the Governor’s diet can be found by clicking these links.

I’m generally cynical when it comes to politicians and their motives, but this strikes me as being a genuine act carried out by someone who truly wants to better understand the issues associated with poverty, and raise the visibility of the problem. I wonder how our Governor would respond if she were asked to do something similar. It wouldn’t hurt to ask. For that matter, why not ask the other 49 governors, and then post their responses together on the web? Can someone please get on that?