Four hundred years later, Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson has once again cast himself in the title role, with the Utah Legislature as his implacable foe. Which raises this question: Who better to play the part of a tilter at windmills? And this: Is tilting at windmills a desirable role for a mayor?

These are fair questions after the Democratic mayor took the bulk of his social agenda to the City Council this week and asked that it be added to the portfolio of issues the council will pay an outside lobbyist to promote on the city's behalf before the very Republican Legislature.

Anderson's legislative list includes living-wage contracts, hate-crimes legislation, expanding sex education in public schools, toughening gun laws, relaxing some liquor laws, prohibiting smoking in bars, making bicycling safer, allowing use of PhotoCop to fine speeding drivers, and repealing of the state ban on adoptions by gays and unmarried heterosexuals.

If the list sounds familiar, that is because much of it is. In July, Anderson unveiled a list of "freedoms" he said were essential for economic development and personal freedom. In a textbook bad example in the art of persuasion, he criticized the Legislature for having passed laws infringing on those freedoms and urged lawmakers to repeal or amend them.

Members of the City Council rightly questioned whether the mayor's in-your-face support for his agenda - which includes some issues they, and we, support - would in any way enhance its prospects for passage on Capitol Hill. Or if, more likely, it would hinder them.

Anderson, the highest-profile Democrat in the state, is not necessarily the party's best advocate for statewide social reforms. Having earned the deep enmity of many Republicans with his opposition to the Legacy Highway and to the LDS Church's initial plans to control behavior on the Main Street Plaza, Anderson enjoys little political leverage outside the capital city, although his popularity within it has won him two elected mandates.

Into his second term, Anderson remains far more the attacking trial lawyer he was than the political figure he became. His tenacity in standing on principles he believes in is laudable. But, like it or not, politics is the art of compromise. It is an art essential to Anderson's attempts to shape the future of the city's downtown and to bridge the city's religious and cultural rifts.

Yet, it is an art in which Anderson, our unapologetic Mayor de la Mancha, remains, whether by choice or by instinct, a lowly apprentice.