troller nominee.

Some fatherly advice augmented the luck.

Dan went to his father in the aftermath of working the 1996 election as Illinois political director for President Bill Clinton's re-election campaign. He told his father that his work around the state had brought him into contact with many people who were urging him to run for statewide office and saying they would support him.

"I said, 'Well, talk is cheap,"' recalls Tom, who advised his son to go back to those people and see if they really were willing to support him before he got carried away with the notion of running. "I'm thinking to myself, 'You know politicians."'

So one snowy January 1997 morning, Dan Hynes put on one of his Brooks Brothers suits, climbed into his Pontiac Bonneville and drove to the Quad Cities for a meeting with veteran Rock Island County Democratic Chairman John Gianulis.

Hynes, just 28 at the time, didn't explain the purpose of the meeting to Gianulis in advance. He figured it would be a credibility test.

"He had three words to say to me: 'Let's do it.' From that day, I never stopped. I just stayed in my car and knocked on doors," Hynes says, explaining how he would travel alone to different downstate areas to meet with leading Democrats and ask for their endorsement.

His last name certainly helped in these meetings, but his enthusiasm didn't hurt either. Folks who are accustomed to judging the latest political flesh felt they had found a winner.

"Dan developed his own network very quickly," marveled Lebed, a longtime political operative for Democrat Roland Burris and more recently with Cook County Board President John Stroger. Lebed also tried to make a run for the comptroller nomination but got steamrolled by Hynes and dropped out of the primary before he really got in.

By the time Democrats gathered that spring for a conference at Springfield's Hilton Hotel, Hynes had already lined up the support of 50 top party leaders. Instead of serving as a showcase for the party's prospective gubernatorial candidates, the gathering turned into a showcase for the young comptroller candidate, who threw such a big, well organized reception that governor hopeful John Schmidt had to abandon his own suite and come to Hynes' affair to find a crowd to work. "It made a pretty loud statement," Hynes says proudly of the Springfield event.

He followed that up a couple of months later with another loud statement: a fundraiser at Navy Pier that enticed some 4,000 young people to pay $35 for a combination party and political rally that signaled he could make good on his promise to attract young voters. The Navy Pier event was part of a well orchestrated plan to turn Hynes' glaring weaknesses, his youth and inexperience, into assets. He would represent an age group that felt it had no representation. He would make sure his energy offset any concerns about experience. His youth movement was so complete that his press secretary, Gail Handleman, found herself the old-timer in the campaign at age 34.

On a separate front, Hynes parlayed his father's connections into an impressive fundraising machine that raised and spent nearly $1.8 million over the two-year cycle, allowing Hynes to wrap up the general election campaign with two weeks of "Hynes, not like the ketchup" commercials to introduce himself downstate.

The Cook County assessor's office is one of the strongest fundraising bases in the state because of its importance to Chicago's real estate industry the developers who want their assessments lowered, the real estate tax lawyers who help lower them and the appraisers who help supply the ammunition. Those groups donated heavily to the younger Hynes. But so did an amazing cross-section of Chicago's Irish community and captains of industry. Even the Republican Duchossois family,