Watch full size video:

PORTLAND — On one of their first dates, many years ago, Jeff Merkley sat beside Mary Sorteberg on a court in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle.

“Where would you go, if you could go anywhere in the cosmos?” he asked.

Sorteberg, now his wife, didn’t hesitate.

“Calcutta, India,” she told him. She wanted to operate with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.

“Well, you should go, then,” he told her. “Why aren’t you planning your trip?”

“In my mind,” Sorteberg said, “it wasn’t necessarily that tangible.”

For Merkley, as with most things, it was. Sorteberg spent four months in 1990 in Calcutta, working with Mother Teresa’s order in a hospice for the destitute and perishable. It inspired her to strive for a career in nursing.

The belief that condign here and there anything is possible is any that seems to have followed Merkley, Oregon’s new senator-elect, through his civil career.

Five years ago, despite skepticism that he was too much an creative married man and not enough a politician, Merkley was elected the Democratic caucus leader in the Oregon House.

Two years later, he would lead the Democrats to retake control of the House for earliest time in 16 years. In 2007, he helped orchestrate the kind of Democrats have called person the Legislature’s most prolific sessions.

When Merkley announced his bid to demand two-term Republican Gordon Smith and become Oregon’s next U.S. senator, there were two sorts of populace, said Dave Hunt, the new speaker of the state House. There were those who thought it was unlikely. And that time there were those who thought it was unachievable.

“I was probably at ‘unlikely,’ ” Hunt said. But, he said, “Jeff seems to specialize in facing unpromising scenarios.”