(FORTUNE Magazine) – Okay, Michael Barnes, we agree that rote memory is not what the citizens necessarily look for in senior solons. We also agree it's not easy to answer questions thrown at you suddenly when onstage and under lights. On the other hand, one would assume that a foreign affairs subcommittee chairman occasionally reads something about foreign affairs. So how can you not know that Shimon Peres is Prime Minister of Israel? Or that Oliver Tambo heads the African National Congress? Easily the most wonderful story in the newspapers on July 25 was the report in the Washington Post about the pop quiz sprung on Democratic Representatives Barnes and Barbara Mikulski, along with various other aspirants to the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Charles Mathias of Maryland. The politicians who consented to be interviewed by WJZ-TV of Baltimore were assuming, plausibly, that they'd be allowed to blather freely and not required to prove their brain cells were charging. Instead they got this quiz, on which both Barnes and Mikulski scored horrifyingly low. She thought the ANC was headed by Jonas Savimbi, who is on the opposite side of the fence and furthermore is fighting in Angola, not South Africa. However, their answers were not the funniest supplied by the contestants. George Haley, a minor candidate who happens to be the brother of Alex Haley (author of Roots), identified the head of the ANC as ''Sambo.'' Our own special favorite, though, was the response given by a Marxist candidate when % asked to state who was scheduled to be Israel's premier next year. Desperate answer: ''A little Jewish fellow.''