Big Doins in my District

I always knew the only way to get rid of Mark Udall in my Congressional District (CO2) would be to have him run for the US Senate. Rep. Udall is popular (yes, he is one of those Udalls), and the district is very liberal.

Well he is running; jk's prediction: he'll beat anybody but Bill Owens, and he'll give Owens a good fight. You must remember that while Colorado is Republican leaning, we sent Tim Wirth and Gary Hart to the Senate (don't blame me, I was too young!).

Who's running for Congress? John Fund delivers the news in today's OpinionJournal Political Diary:

It looks as if Congress is about to get its first dot-com tycoon. Jared Polis, who founded such Internet start-ups as Proflowers.com and Dan's Chocolates, has announced he'll run as a Democrat for the Colorado House seat of Rep. Mark Udall, who is leaving to run for a vacant Senate seat.

The 28-year-old Mr. Polis served as CEO of Bluemountain.com, the most popular electronic greeting card site on the Internet, until he sold the company in 1999. The next year he jumped into politics by winning a seat on the Colorado Board of Education by 90 votes after outspending his opponent by $1 million to $11,000. He now serves as the board's chairman, after a rocky start in which he became the only board member to don a black judicial robe to hear appeals from charter school operators.

His vast wealth is likely to scare away most challengers in the Boulder-based district, which went for Al Gore by 52% to 43% in 2000. No doubt we will soon be regaled with stories about Mr. Polis's wunderkind business career, which started with him going to Moscow at the age of 17 and spending a summer trading privatization vouchers on the Russian Commodities Exchange.

His political career got started when he served as regional campaign manager for Gray Davis in his failed 1992 U.S. Senate campaign in California. Last year, he financed a ballot initiative to allow same-day voter registration in Colorado, which voters rejected by 2-to-1 after concerns about possible fraud emerged. Look for the Democratic Party to have a new spokesman on technology and education when Mr. Polis goes to Washington.