Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday, so one night about 15 years ago
I went to a bar in Chicago and through a mutual friend, I made the acquaintance of a mathematician named Daniel Biss.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed talking to Daniel that evening on account of how throughout my life
I had worked pretty hard to avoid
Interactions with professional mathematicians, like I chose the college I attended in part because you didn't have to take math to graduate. Also
It's hard to make friends in adulthood, and I've never been good at it
But as Daniel, and I played an exceptionally poor game of pool that night
I had the feeling that I was making a friend and it turns out I was right Daniel and I have now been
friends for more than a third of our lives. He is the smartest person I have ever known
he was 25 when we met and had already gotten his PhD in math from MIT and was working as a professor at the
University of Chicago, but he has never treated me as anything other than an intellectual equal
And we remained close throughout big changes in our lives
I met Sarah and moved to New York
and then eventually
Indianapolis and became a dad. Daniel fell in love with a
Historian and they got married and moved to the suburbs of Chicago
and had two beautiful kids. Everything was good and
Normal, and then one day Daniel called me with the worst idea I had ever heard in my entire life
Which was that
He wanted to leave his very good job at the University of Chicago and run for a seat in the Illinois State House of Representatives
This seemed like a bad idea to me first because Daniel is like
nerdy. In my mind politicians were slick and wore tailored suits and Dan-- I
Don't know that Daniel owned a suit. Sara
and I were in the audience for Daniel's campaign announcement and what may have been his first-ever campaign speech and while his eloquence and
Intelligence were obvious as I was driving home, I couldn't help but think that Daniel
How do I phrase this gently?
Might eventually find his way back to abstract mathematics. And indeed while Daniel's 2008 race for state rep was
Agonizingly close, he lost. But he ran again in 2010 and won
And then in 2012 he became a state senator. And over the last eight years Daniel has become a brilliant politician and an extraordinarily effective
Legislator in a state where it's famously hard to get anything done
He's built bipartisan support on everything from improving retirement benefits
to ending exploitative student loan practices. And now he is running for governor of Illinois. Not just running in fact
he has a very good chance of winning the Democratic primary on March 20th even though his two opponents are
a billionaire who has spent tens of millions of dollars on advertising and a literal Kennedy
Those are the kinds of people we tend to think of as likely politicians
heirs to famous families, billionaires who can buy all the TV ads they want
I don't generally think of politicians as people, like in my mind they're somewhere between super heroes and super villains
Larger-than-life characters with tremendous powers battling it out while the rest of us get our houses stomped on by their giant robot suits
But imagining electoral politics that way can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy
Like the main reason I didn't think Daniel should run for office all those years ago was because he didn't seem to me
like the kind of person who would succeed at it.
But if people like Daniel don't run for office or we don't elect them
Then we end up with the comic book version of electoral politics.
Obviously we don't need Lex Luthor running our governments, but I also don't think we need Superman;
we need capable people who know how to govern, who can build consensus,
who can listen well, and who can hold competing ideas in their minds.
When your friend runs for governor you realize that politicians are people
Even the billionaires, even the Kennedys
So the question becomes not who looks or acts the part or who has the money or whatever
Else the question becomes which of these people, no more or less human than I
do I think would be best at this job
And if I thought of politics that way. I would have understood from the beginning that Daniel would make a successful politician
And for me that is real cause for optimism
I am so proud of Daniel and really excited to support him
He and I are gonna do a Facebook live event this Thursday at 1:00pm Eastern Time.
I'll ask him some questions
You can ask some too, more info in the doobly-doo below
and if you live in Illinois, VOTE.
Also if you don't live in Illinois, VOTE. Hank, I will see you on Friday