Quick Links

Mr. Treasurer

Alexi Giannoulias (CAS’98) is a rising star in Illinois politics.

By Bari Walsh

He’s only thirty-one, and a political rookie, but Alexi Giannoulias (CAS’98) is having a veteran’s impact on governance in his home state of Illinois. After a tough campaign that skipped deftly across the minefield that is Illinois politics, Giannoulias was elected state treasurer last November, when he was thirty. He is the youngest person to hold that office in the country.

 

He’ll need all the clichés about youthful energy to prove true as he sets out to fulfill an ambitious, progressive agenda. In his first eight months in office, he’s already overhauled the state’s college-savings program, introduced a measure to reward the use of hybrid cars, enacted far-reaching ethics reform, and launched a program to increase the financial literacy of Illinoisans.

 

“I love my job,” he says. “Back and forth between Springfield and Chicago, putting together new programs that have never been done before in the state treasurer’s office, finding innovative ways to invest the state’s $17 billion. It’s thrilling.” And also still a bit surreal, since neither he nor much of anyone else in Illinois thought he’d survive the Democratic primary, much less win the election.

 

The big influences in Giannoulias’s life, aside from politics, are family and basketball, and both brought him to BU. He had started college at the University of Chicago, but his older brother George (MET’96) was at BU and loving it. He encouraged Alexi to transfer. “I lived with him my first year there — he’s a great brother,” the younger Giannoulias says. “I wouldn’t have wound up there without him.”

 

A standout basketball player, he played Division I ball at BU and gets nostalgic recalling those years. “I loved my days as a Terrier,” he says. “I miss my lunches at T. Anthony’s. I miss T’s Pub.” After graduation, he played professional basketball in Greece for a year, “a great experience. For someone to pay me to play basketball — it was almost funny to me.” His parents had emigrated from Greece in the 1960s, and he’s visited the country often; he still has a grandmother there and speaks the language fluently.

 

Giannoulias went on to get a law degree at Tulane University and then to work with his brothers and father at Broadway Bank, the community bank his father had founded on the North Side of Chicago. From humble roots, the bank has grown dramatically, with assets now of more than $750 million. By the time he quit to launch his campaign, Giannoulias had become the bank’s vice president and senior loan officer.

 

He had always loved politics and had done some volunteer work for Illinois Senator Barack Obama, a close friend and mentor whom he’d met on the basketball courts in Chicago, but he wasn’t planning to launch a political career for himself so early. When this opportunity came up, “I was twenty-nine years old, and I had never run for any elected office before,” Giannoulias says. “But I just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a banker as the state’s banker, to get some fresh blood, to get someone in who could bring an innovative perspective to the office?’”

 

So he set off — and it was uphill right out of the gate. “With my last name, it wasn’t really a great ballot name,” he jokes. “No one thought we’d win. Every group, every Democratic organization, everybody was against us — the mayor, the governor, everybody. But we ended up winning the primary by twenty-three points.” How? By focusing on the financial expertise he would bring to the office, and by working “really, really hard. We traveled the state, putting in eighteen-hour days, talking about fresh leadership, talking about ideas. Every two weeks we’d put out a new initiative or goal.” He continued that pace during the general election campaign, and Obama’s support, in the form of television and radio commercials, proved key as he defeated Republican challenger Christine Radogno.

 

He credits his brothers — George, who specializes in real-estate banking, and Demetris, who is Broadway’s chief financial officer — with making sacrifices to support his campaign, especially after the death of their father, Alexis, several months before the election.

 

His brothers “get a kick out of me being state treasurer, the baby of the family,” he says. “It’s still comical to them. Everywhere I go it’s ‘Mr. Treasurer, Mr. Treasurer,’ but when I go home, it’s like, ‘Go take the garbage out.’”

 

Giannoulias is working to establish himself as a serious policymaker, and his early accomplishments suggest he’s got the knack. His revamping of the poor-performing Bright Start College Savings program, for example, has resulted in lower fees, expanded investment options, and dramatically improved rates of return. But he knows his youth leaves him open to charges of inexperience, so he sometimes feels pressure to be extra serious. Some of the things a thirty-one-year-old single guy might like to do — drinks with friends after work, say — have been declared off limits for now.

 

“There are a lot of things I can’t do, won’t do anymore. Even when I go to the movies, I have to dress up now. I used to just throw on a pair of sweats and a hat, now I have to put khakis on,” he laughs. “You become kind of paranoid.” But it’s a problem he’s happy to have. “I love public service. I love trying to put ideas together to help people live better lives,” he says. He’s been in office only eight months, and already the speculation about another statewide campaign, this one for governor, has begun.

 

First published in the Arts+Sciences, the alumni magazine of the College and Graduate school of Arts and Sciences.