The Audacity of Hope

business to Goldman Sachs a few years earlier for $531 million. Undoubtedly he had a
genuine, if undefined, desire to serve, and by all accounts he was a brilliant man. But on
the campaign trail he was almost painfully shy, with the quirky, inward manner of
someone who’d spent most of his life alone in front of a computer screen. I suspect that
like many people, he figured that being a politician—unlike being a doctor or airline
pilot or plumber—required no special expertise in anything useful, and that a
businessman like himself could perform at least as well, and probably better, than any
of the professional pols he saw on TV. In fact, Mr. Hull viewed his facility with
numbers as an invaluable asset: At one point in the campaign, he divulged to a reporter
a mathematical formula that he’d developed for winning campaigns, an algorithm that
began
Probability = 1/(1 + exp(-1 × (-3.9659056 + (General Election Weight × 1.92380219)…
and ended several indecipherable factors later.
All of which made it easy to write off Mr. Hull as an opponent—until one morning in
April or May, when I pulled out of the circular driveway of my condo complex on the
way to the office and was greeted by row upon row of large red, white, and blue lawn
signs marching up and down the block. BLAIR HULL FOR U.S. SENATE, the signs
read, and for the next five miles I saw them on every street and along every major
thoroughfare, in every direction and in every nook and cranny, in barbershop windows
and posted on abandoned buildings, in front of bus stops and behind grocery store
counters—Hull signs everywhere, dotting the landscape like daisies in spring.
There is a saying in Illinois politics that “signs don’t vote,” meaning that you can’t
judge a race by how many signs a candidate has. But nobody in Illinois had ever seen
during the course of an entire campaign the number of signs and billboards that Mr.
Hull had put up in a single day, or the frightening efficiency with which his crews of
paid workers could yank up everybody else’s yard signs and replace them with Hull
signs in the span of a single evening. We began to read about certain neighborhood
leaders in the black community who had suddenly decided that Mr. Hull was a
champion of the inner city, certain downstate leaders who extolled Mr. Hull’s support of
the family farm. And then the television ads hit, six months out and ubiquitous until
Election Day, on every station around the state around the clock—Blair Hull with
seniors, Blair Hull with children, Blair Hull ready to take back Washington from the
special interests. By January 2004, Mr. Hull had moved into first place in the polls and
my supporters began swamping me with calls, insisting that I had to do something,
telling me I had to get on TV immediately or all would be lost.
What could I do? I explained that unlike Mr. Hull I practically had a negative net worth.
Assuming the best-case scenario, our campaign would have enough money for exactly
four weeks of television ads, and given this fact it probably didn’t make sense for us to
blow the entire campaign budget in August. Everybody just needed to be patient, I
would tell supporters. Stay confident. Don’t panic. Then I’d hang up the phone, look out
the window, and happen to catch sight of the RV in which Hull tooled around the state,
big as an ocean liner and reputedly just as well appointed, and I would wonder to myself
if perhaps it was time to panic after all.