Move Over, Christian Coalition: The New Political Kingmakers

Susan Polis Schutz, poses with her husband, Stephen Schutz, and son Jared, of Boulder, Colo., based Blue Mountain Arts greeting card co., pose in La Jolla, Calif., Feb. 1, 1999. (Photo: Denis Poroy/AP)

Part 3: Nuking the GOP

Jared Polis is late for lunch. Snatching his Dell laptop from his desk, the bespectacled millionaire races out the door of his third-floor office in downtown Boulder. It’s a sunny September day, with the jagged Rockies soaring to a crystal-blue sky. Polis doesn’t notice the weather. Dressed in a golf shirt, Dockers and hiking boots, he’s glued to his cell phone as he speed-walks to his apartment a few blocks away.

He arrives to a crowd of about a dozen people waiting in his living room. Polis’s home is more Tribeca than Boulder, filled with brushed steel, tubular lamps and ankle-high sofas. A huge fish tank filled with coral and angelfish glows in the entryway, and the living room is dominated by a giant flat-screen TV and four leather lounge chairs. Dozens of shiny copper pots hang from the ceiling kitchen, though Polis later acknowledges, “They’re mainly for show. I don’t really have time to cook.”

The people gathered are all friends and family of Jared’s. Most are rich Democrats. They include David Friedman, a prominent fund-raiser and owner of a chain of extended-care homes in New England. One of the founders of PayPal is there, along with two other tech mavens, a finance entrepreneur and Brad Feld, a top venture capitalist, wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

Jared’s parents, Susan and Stephen Schutz, whom Jared describes as “classic hippies,” also stop by. (Jared uses his mother’s maiden name “Polis,” because he says he “liked the sound of it better.”) This afternoon, Susan, who has purple-streaked hair, is wearing a tangerine-colored scarf and dark sunglasses.

The lunch, like most Polis events, has a political purpose—to raise money for Colorado’s Democratic candidate for governor, Bill Ritter. Ritter, a square-jawed, highly polished former district attorney, is critical to the Democrats’ hopes in Colorado. If he wins, the Democrats will control all three branches of state government for the first time since 1961. Jared has hosted or co-hosted fund-raisers that have raised more than $300,000 for Ritter. And he’s donated thousands of dollars to various Democratic legislators. Today’s lunch raises about $10,000.

The group talks about the environment, technology, tourism and business and gently prods [Ritter] to stay clear of religious issues while in government. At the end of the lunch, Polis makes a request for the group to donate more time and money to the Democrats. “They need our help,” he says. “If you haven’t given the maximum allowable, please do. And you can still give up to $2,500 to the party, which can also help Ritter. So I would urge you to take a look at how much you’ve given and see if you could do more.”
Newly elected State Board of Education at large member, Jared Polis gives two thumbs up, July 29, 2000. (Photo: Denver Post)

Polis looks at the clock, realizes he’s late for his next meeting and dashes out the door.

“I don’t know where he gets all his energy,” says his mother. “It sure didn’t come from us.”

Polis does credit his parents for his entrepreneurial zeal, which has made him one of the youngest tech tycoons in America. His mom and dad are self-described “flower children” who protested Vietnam and traveled the country in the late 1960s selling homemade posters from the back of a pickup truck. They formed a company called Blue Mountain Arts and started publishing poetry books. She wrote the poems; her husband did the artwork. When a few of the books became bestsellers, they moved to an upscale neighborhood near San Diego, where Jared grew up.

Even at a young age, Polis had a knack for making money. In high school, he started a scrap-metal trading firm that bought old jeeps and shell casings from the Department of Defense and sold them to steel mills. He also sold tomatoes from a roadside stand, helped his parents as a salesman for Blue Mountain and spent a summer in Russia trading privatization vouchers on the Russian Commodities Exchange.

He also loved politics. When he was 11, a local developer announced plans to build homes around a canyon that Jared and his brother used as their daily playground. Jared overheard his parents talking about the plans and asked to go to a city council meeting to oppose the plans. He stood up and gave a rousing speech opposing the project, and convinced the town council to scale back the development.

“That was when he realized he could have an impact on public policy,” says his younger brother, Jorian.

Polis founded a Young Democrats Club in high school and at 13 volunteered on Senator Alan Cranston’s reelection campaign. He always had a soft spot for kids; one day in high school he brought home a dozen Mexican orphans whom he’d agreed to house for a night as part of his work with the Spanish Language Club.

“Mom was pretty surprised when I showed up with these orphans,” he recalls. “But she let them stay.”

Polis finished high school early and went to Princeton at age 16. Even with a double course load, he found time to team up with two friends to start American Information Systems (AIS), an Internet service provider in Chicago. He spent most of his senior year flying to Chicago, raising financing and running the business. They sold it a few years later for $20 million.

Jared Polis on the campaign trail running for the State Board of Education, Aug. 16, 2000. (Photo: John Epperson/The Denver Post)

In 1996, he and his parents formed an offshoot of Blue Mountain called BlueMountain.com, which made digital greeting cards. At the height of the dot-com bubble in 1999, Polis and his family sold the business to Excite@Home for more than $700 million, despite the company’s lack of profits (it was later
resold for less than $40 million). Meantime, Polis launched Provide Commerce, whose ProFlowers service cut the price of sending flowers by allowing customers to purchase directly from growers over the Internet. Polis sold that company in 2005 for more than $450 million.

For all his riches, Polis has a decidedly low-key lifestyle. Aside from his loft, which he calls his “one extravagance,” he has small apartments in Denver and Manhattan. He avoids the Aspen scene, rarely travels and says he usually flies commercial. His offices in Boulder and Denver are jammed with staffers who work for his various foundations, start-up companies, personal investment firms and nonprofit groups — all under the unofficial umbrella of Jared Polis Inc. He does most of his work in the passenger seat of his Lexus hybrid SUV, typing away on his laptop and cell phone, while his driver, Mark, speeds him from meeting to meeting.

“I don’t know, maybe it’s ADD (attention deficit disorder), but I like to be involved in a lot of different things,” he says.

He says he rarely stresses out, since “getting stressed is nonproductive and I avoid things that are nonproductive.” Even his leisure time is results driven: When he watches movies at home, he taps out e-mails on his laptop. “I figure that I’m only 25 percent productive when I’m watching a movie, but I can still get a lot done.” He says he does most of his book reading in the shower.

“I take 30-minute showers, which is pretty long. All the pages get wet, so you can tell which books I’ve read in my house because they’re all puffy from the water.”

Polis’s central political issue is education. The wealth boom of the last decade, he says, has left out too many Americans and improving the education system is the best way to help level the playing field.

“For me, it’s all about opportunity, and how to bring it to all Americans so they can succeed,” he says. “To give them a chance to reach their potential.”

Polis has launched a chain of charter schools, called the New America Schools, for immigrants who are struggling to learn English and go to school at night after work. He served on the Colorado Board of Education until 2007, funds a teacher award program, publishes an education newsletter and has helped campaign for several bond issues to fund school expansions.

Polis’s ultimate goal is to run for political office, probably
Congress. To get there, he’ll have to overcome his rich-kid, smarter-than-thou image, as well as his occasional discomfort in social situations. During a visit to his charter school one morning, he popped into a class and introduced himself to a startled Mexican teenager.

“Hi, I’m Jared Polis. I started this school,” Polis said, holding out his hand for a shake.

“Oh. Okay, cool,” the boy said, staring blankly at Polis’s hand.

Polis’s personal life may also become a barrier to higher office, especially among conservative Colorado voters. This year, after persistent rumors about his personal life, Polis announced to a Boulder newspaper that he is gay. Polis says, “I’ve always felt my personal life is personal. I think sexual orientation, like religion or race, has nothing to do with one’s values, and to most people it’s not important one way or the other.”

Polis has also proven that money talks in politics. His career as an elected official began in 2000, when he decided to run for the state’s Board of Education. The Board of Ed’s at-large seat has always been one of the more mundane elected offices in Colorado — somewhere between county commissioner and state legislator. Races for the seat were low-budget affairs, costing a few thousand dollars. Polis spent more than $1 million on the race. He bought a yellow school bus, loaded it with computers and tech gear and traveled the state to campaign and teach children about technology. He bought ads, put up signs and sent out mailings. He shipped 63 bouquets of flowers to the state’s 63 Democratic county chairmen. Polis’s opponent, former state senator Ben Alexander, says he spent about $7,000. Yet Polis won by a razor-thin margin of less than 100 votes, out of 1.5 million ballots cast.

“At one point,” Alexander said, “when I heard he was willing to spend $1 million, I thought of writing him a letter saying ‘Let’s split it in half, you give me $500,000 and I promise, I’ll drop out.’ I never sent it, but I wish I had.”

It was just the beginning of the Polis money machine. Over the next few years, Polis gave generously to Democratic causes and candidates. He created $1,000 awards for teachers, contributed to soft-money committees and funded liberal Web sites. It was all a prelude to his greatest contribution — as a founding member of the Gang of Four.

Part 1: The New Political Kingmakers

Part 2: Learjet Liberals

Part 4: A Band of Brothers

Reprinted from "Richistan: A Journey Through The American Wealth Boom And The Lives of The New Rich" by Robert Frank. Copyright © 2007. Published by Crown Business, a division of Random House, Inc.

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