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  • 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

Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday, so one night about 15 years ago

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當你的朋友競選州長時 (When Your Friend Runs for Governor)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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