ONE OLD friend of J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire governor of Illinois, tells a story about his first attempt to win office. In 1998 Mr Pritzker ran for Illinois’s ninth congressional district, which then covered a swathe of northern Chicago and its suburbs. At the age of just 33, he spent half a million dollars of his own money on television ads for the Democratic primary. But what he could not deal with was Chicago’s traditional form of politics. Friends told him that he needed to attend half a dozen local Democratic Party picnics and make sure that party members could always come to him for jobs at the Hyatt hotel chain, which his family owns. This, he said, he could not do. He went to the picnics, but he could not change his family firm’s hiring rules just to get votes. In Chicago in the 1990s to have such clout but to be unable to deploy it was a political death sentence. In the primary he came third.
