Since I'm in the Mood to Discuss Politics

Or perhaps I should say: A good week gets better.

Brad Koplinski is a dear friend of mine. He was one of the first people I met on day one of law school, and we ended up as close friends.

We won the New England School of Law Jeopardy! Tournament right before we graduated. Brad had business in his birth state of Illinois, in Springfield to be exact, and made a mad dash from Springfield to O'Hare to fly back for the tourney. He entered the room 30 seconds before the judges were going to disqualify us, and then he and I systematically demolished the competition. It was such a blowout, in fact, that I was ringing another team's buzzer to boost the score for them. (Brad has also been on the actual Jeopardy! but I won't tell you how he fared. Perhaps if Alex Trebek had allowed him to have a partner, our student loan balances would be considerably lower than they are now.)

Brad, who tends to be more modest than I am, is also a writer. He took on an ambitious project in the late 90s, interviewing nearly every living person (at the time) who had mounted a presidential campaign. The result was Hats in the Ring, a really well-written, beautifully-researched book that came out about seven years ago. We had drinks one weekend in Boston when he came up to interview Mike Dukakis. His story of breakfast in Dukakis's kitchen is priceless. If my memory serves me correctly, he also scored a decent interview with John Schmitz, the right wing nutjob better known as Mary Kay LeTourneau's father, before Schmitz died.

Brad toiled in Washington for the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and with the Treasury Department. He also spent a bundle of time working on President Clinton's re-election. He was heavily involved in the 2000 campaign, and ran central Pennsylvania for John Kerry in 2004. He liked Harrisburg so much that he stayed there.

And now he's running for City Council.

I worked in politics for ten years, but I'm a campaign operative, not a candidate. Brad's my friend, and he's the real deal. Go check out his site. I'll be making a contribution shortly. And if he needs a weekend volunteer, it's not that long a drive. We just did Hershey and Gettysburg in July, so I even know the route.

Adam