New kid on the block

It 's a Saturday morning four months after his election as Illinois comptroller, and Daniel W Hynes is up and about early for a speech to a student group in Hinsdale. Getting young people politically involved had been a trademark of Hynes' campaign success. At age 30, he's the youngest person elected to statewide office in Illinois since the end of World War II. But even for Hynes, this Saturday morning audience seems a tad premature 100 junior high school student council members who are holding a leadership workshop.

His off-the-cuff talk with them is earnest and idealistic, maybe even a little moralistic, like something one of the kids would deliver at their eighth-grade graduation. "Being a leader is about more than just running for office," he tells them. "It's about more than getting votes and being in a position where you can make executive decisions. Being a leader is about doing the right thing each and every day."

You wonder what Hynes is doing here, and then you do the math. If you add eight years to the age of even the youngest kid in the room, you realize that all of them will be old enough to vote by 2006, when this Democrat should be ready to take his first shot at something really big, like governor. That's assuming he's patient enough to wait that long and doesn't really have his sights set on Peter Fitzgerald's U.S. Senate seat in 2004. Either way, one of these kids might even be ready by then to organize a college dorm for him.

In reality, he's here as a favor to a friend who is one of the adult leaders of the workshop, and he seems genuinely pleased to do so. It doesn't take a cynical political pundit to see that the future looms big and bright for Dan Hynes, a Chicago lawyer who is not expected to practice that profession again for many, many years. He's got the look of a political thoroughbred and the bloodlines to prove it. He wouldn't be where he is today if his father weren't Thomas Hynes, former Cook County assessor and one-time Illinois Senate president who still runs one of the Strongest political organizations in Chicago. But it's doubtful that his father could have been much help if other political leaders and opinion makers throughout the state hadn't sensed that this is a young man with the intellect, drive and charisma to make a go of it on his own.

It's a low-key charisma, to be sure, but even this bunch of junior high school kids, probably more intent on meeting a cute boy or girl from another school, can see the "Can't Miss" label etched into the fresh Irish face standing before them. One of them asks if he's planning to run for higher office.

"I don't know," says Hynes, and then proceeds to talk as if he's got a pretty good idea. "When I decided to run for office, I was hoping to do it for many years. I didn't want to do it for four years and go back to being a lawyer. I think I've got a lot to add, a lot to contribute. I think it's going to take a long time for me to accomplish everything I want to."

Maybe that just means Hynes is planning to stay two terms as comptroller to achieve his goal of turning it into "an exciting proactive office" instead of being just the state's bill payer. After all, eight years does loom as a particularly "long time" for somebody who just left college six years ago. And Hynes could stay put and still run for a bigger office if the legislature approves a proposal favored in concept by both state Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka and him to merge their two jobs before 2002.

But the clear sense of most everybody who encounters young Hynes is that the things he hopes to accomplish will take him much farther up the political food chain some day than this traditional stepping-stone post where he has chosen to get started. As his short-lived Democratic opponent Fred Lebed observes: "Nobody ever has or ever will run for state comptroller who just wants to be state comptroller."

That point comes home again later on this same morning when Hynes stops by the studios of WPNA radio