Reprinted from the April 2008 issue of Columbus Monthly ©.

Coming home

It’s not every day a former DNC chairman moves to Bexley. But then again, David Wilhelm—venture capitalist, political gambler, fierce Ohio loyalist—always has been an unusual power broker.

by Dave Ghose

Earlier this year, David Wilhelm joined Joe Biden in Iowa as an adviser to the Delaware senator’s presidential campaign. Making the rounds, Wilhelm bumped into his old colleague George Stephanopoulos, now the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News. The two sons of Ohio hugged, forever bonded by the crucible of the 1992 campaign that put Bill Clinton in the White House. “You go through something like that, it stays with you,” Wilhelm says.

The reunion was fleeting, however.

To no one’s surprise, Biden fared poorly in the Jan. 3 Iowa Democratic caucus and immediately dropped out of the race. Stephanopoulos moved on to the next big story, the New Hampshire primary, while Wilhelm returned to relative obscurity in Bexley, his home since 2005 after moving from Chicago.

A few weeks later, Wilhelm was asked about that dichotomy. He once was at the pinnacle of politics, managing Clinton’s ’92 campaign and then becoming the youngest chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He inspired a character in the best-selling novel Primary Colors and was one of the last people to talk to Bill Clinton before his famous “60 Minutes” interview about Gennifer Flowers. His admirers include governors, senators, CEOs and civil rights leaders, and his Clinton pals have gone on to write books, serve in Congress and host television talk shows. His most flamboyant former colleague, James Carville, even starred in a Super Bowl ad for Coca-Cola this year.

With that background, Wilhelm must miss being a major player in national politics. “Not so much,” he says, sitting in the dining room of his home next to Bexley High School in late January. Yes, he enjoyed his weeklong return to the fray in Iowa—a favor for his old friend, Biden—and Wilhelm made several national television appearances a few weeks later in support of Barack Obama, whom he endorsed before the March 4 Ohio Democratic primary. But after three decades in the business, Wilhelm recognizes that politics can be “fleeting” and believes he’s found a nice balance in Central Ohio, where he, his wife, Degee, and sons Luke and Logan are happy, and he’s found surprising ways outside of politics to make a difference.

“I like where we are,” says Wilhelm, who grew up in Athens. “I like some of the things I’ve got on the burner that lead me to new and different directions.”

To be sure, Wilhelm always has been an unusual power broker—a rare mix of gumption, good manners and fierce loyalty to his roots in flyover country. Though his return to Ohio might seem strange to outsiders, the homecoming didn’t surprise his friends. “I always figured he’d come back here,” says Columbus political consultant Greg Haas, who’s known Wilhelm since they both worked on Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign as college students in the 1970s.

His friends describe Wilhelm as upbeat, idealistic, “the prince of positive energy.” He’s that rarest of creatures in the political world—a nice guy. “I’ve never had a disagreement with him, which is no credit to me because I’ve had disagreements with virtually everybody else I’ve ever worked with,” Haas says.

Wilhelm also never has been afraid to follow his own idiosyncratic path, running as a dark-horse candidate for Congress in Ohio in 1988 (he lost in the Democratic primary) or jumping on Bill Clinton’s bandwagon three years later when the then Arkansas governor was a long shot for the presidency. “David is a high-risk political person,” Haas says.

In recent years, Wilhelm has reinvented himself as an Ohio-based venture capitalist—a career change that might be his biggest gamble to date. He founded Athens-based Adena Ventures in 2002; the fund focuses on central Appalachia (southeastern Ohio, western Maryland, Kentucky and West Virginia). Later, he started a second fund, Hopewell Ventures, based in Chicago, which targets a seven-state region that stretches from Nebraska to Ohio. “People thought I was nuts,” he says.

Wilhelm long has extolled the virtues of the Midwest and his old stomping grounds in southern Ohio; now he’s investing in a book distributor in Nelsonville, a medical-device manufacturer in Marquette, Michigan, and an in-shell egg-pasteurization company in Lansing, Illinois, among other things. “We go where others fear to tread,” Wilhelm says. “We see companies that others don’t spend the time to go see.”

So far, Wilhelm and his partners are pleased with the results. One of their businesses, TLContact, a Chicago-based Internet company that licenses patient websites to healthcare institutions, was sold to AOL founder Steve Case’s Revolution Health Group last year. Meanwhile, another company, Ed Map of Nelsonville, already has paid back Wilhelm’s 2003 investment and seems poised to further reward him and his partners in the near future, perhaps via a public offering or the sale of the company.

Moreover, Ed Map, which distributes books and course materials to students participating in distance-learning programs, is a rare economic bright spot in Nelsonville, which has struggled in recent years as its top employer, Rocky Boots, has shifted manufacturing jobs overseas.

Ed Map, now one of the biggest companies in the city, has grown spectacularly—from about 13 staffers and $1.5 million in revenue five years ago to about 70 employees and $30 million today. Without Adena, “we certainly wouldn’t have ramped up at the speed that we did and got to this point this quickly,” says CEO Max Mark. “They were a great catalyst in what we have become.” Adds Haas: “In typical David fashion, it’s a win-win kind of thing. He’s helping economically deprived areas and generating venture capital at the same time.”

Indeed, Wilhelm sees his second career as an extension of his progressive politics. He advocates a kinder, gentler form of capitalism, generating solid returns for his investors while also helping often ignored, struggling communities. That’s why Adena might be the only venture capital firm in the world that features a quote from RFK in its brochures and why Wilhelm can count among his supporters civil rights icon Jesse Jackson. “No one has been a smarter, clearer advocate with a vision of where we need to go than David Wilhelm,” says Jackson, who’s known him for nearly two decades.

In 1998, Ohio University invited Jackson to deliver the keynote address at the school’s annual Communication Week. Jackson called Wilhelm and told him about his alma mater’s invitation. “I said, ‘If you’re going to go, you got to go into the hills,’ ” recalls Wilhelm, who was living and working in Chicago at the time.

Jackson took a bus tour through southeastern Ohio and hosted an economic roundtable on the campus of Hocking College in Nelsonville. “I didn’t really know how people would respond to him, but they responded to him very favorably because he showed up,” Wilhelm says. “It was very interesting to me to watch some people I grew up with, other people I knew of, testify about what they could do if only they had access to capital.”

Wilhelm wanted something lasting to grow out of Jackson’s appearance. “Knowing virtually nothing about venture capital, I announced our intent to raise a $15 million fund, and we’re going to invest in Appalachia Ohio,” he says.

Though his original motivation was charitable, Wilhelm concluded the idea made business sense, too. More importantly, he persuaded others to believe in its financial prospects. Wilhelm recruited Lynn Gellermann, a banker from Columbus, to lead the fund and eventually several investors—including Ohio University, American Electric Power and National City Bank—came forward. Four years later, Adena Ventures—named for the early Native American culture that flourished in Ohio—was launched with $34 million and a four-state target area. “Somehow, we pulled it off,” Wilhelm says.

Jackson says Wilhelm succeeded thanks to his remarkable connections. “Very few people have Wilhelm’s range—Appalachia, Wall Street, the White House,” Jackson says. “He’s a venture capitalist, social activist, political activist at the same time.”

After commuting between Chicago and Athens for the first three years of Adena’s existence, Wilhelm and his family relocated to Bexley in August 2005. The move made sense on a professional level, but the main inspiration was something more personal—a tragic car accident in which his brother-in-law died and his sister suffered a brain injury. Bexley is close to Port Columbus (Wilhelm still makes frequent business trips to Chicago) and near his sister in Lancaster and his aging parents, who moved from Athens to Bexley to be closer to their son and his family.

Despite the sad circumstances, the ever-optimistic Wilhelm puts a happy spin on his move. “It was the greatest decision we could ever make for our family,” he says. “The quality of life is great. I love the work that we do in Appalachia. We enjoy Columbus immensely.”

Politics bit Wilhelm at an early age in Athens, where his father taught cultural geography at Ohio University. Wilhelm organized a crossing-guard strike at East Elementary School as a sixth-grader, managed the successful city council campaign of his social studies teacher Pete Lalich while still in high school and slated Ohio delegates for Jimmy Carter as a 19-year-old Ohio University sophomore. “I was a weird kid,” Wilhelm says.

He also suffered his share of defeats. In 1987, he managed Biden’s infamous presidential campaign that ended amid allegations the senator plagiarized a speech from British politician Neil Kinnock. And a year later, Wilhelm returned to Athens and made his ill-fated run for Congress, something his mentor Lalich urged him against. “I didn’t think he had a chance,” says Lalich, a former chairman of the Democratic Party in Athens County. “It was a heavily Republican district. But he wanted to do it. It was a lifelong dream.”

But some good did come out of that period: During the Biden campaign, Wilhelm met his future wife, Degee, who later also worked as a traveling aide for Clinton, and got to know the famous Daley family of Chicago. In 1989, Wilhelm ran Richard Daley’s successful mayoral campaign, making him a hot commodity in the next presidential race in which Illinois was expected to be a key battleground.

On the Clinton campaign, Wilhelm was the detail-oriented, behind-the-scenes guy. While his more famous colleagues Carville and Stephanopoulos got most of the face time on TV, Wilhelm stayed in Little Rock, made the trains run on time and managed egos—no small task with that political team. “If you had a different personality type, somebody who was just trying to insert themselves all the time, the chemistry of the campaign would have been altogether different,” says Haas, the Ohio campaign manager for Clinton in ’92.

Wilhelm also emphasized the importance of the Midwest—especially Ohio. The famous bus trip through the heartland was his idea, and Wilhelm, then-Sen. John Glenn and a few others fought a successful battle to keep Ohio a top priority. Haas calls that decision “the most important of the campaign,” pointing to what happened in 2000 when Al Gore abandoned Ohio and handed the presidency to George W. Bush.

Clinton rewarded Wilhelm—only 36 at the time—by making him the DNC chairman in 1993. But what sounded like a great honor actually turned out to be miserable work. No matter the circumstances, the DNC job is fast-paced and intense. For instance, Wilhelm has a photograph of himself and Steven Spielberg, but has no memory of the meeting.

On top of the usual challenges, Wilhelm steered the party during some of the worst periods of the Clinton years—Whitewater, the healthcare fiasco, gays in the military. And as the party suffered through a string of defeats in special elections and mayoral races in Los Angeles and New York, Wilhelm became a scapegoat—much like the manager of a losing baseball team. Haas says the real failure was in the White House political operation. “He had to go out and be the face of a lot of those bad decisions that he wasn’t even part of,” Haas says. Wilhelm announced in August 1994 that he would step down after that year’s midterm elections. He returned to Chicago and founded a public affairs firm, Wilhelm & Conlon, with prominent labor attorney Kevin Conlon. “I sort of jumped before I got pushed,” Wilhelm says.

Today, politics is still part of his life. During the last Ohio gubernatorial campaign, Wilhelm served as Ted Strickland’s “debate negotiator”—choosing the dates, times and formats. And in mid February, Wilhelm made headlines with his endorsement of Obama. National media outlets relished the irony of Bill Clinton’s former campaign manager backing his wife’s opponent. But the decision is less surprising considering Wilhelm’s deep Chicago ties: Obama’s top strategist, David Axelrod, worked alongside Wilhelm on Paul Simon’s upset Senate campaign in 1984, eight years before Clinton took the White House.

But Wilhelm’s focus remains his ven-ture capital work. And even when he appeared on “Hardball with Chris Mat-thews” in February to explain his Obama endorsement, Wilhelm steered the conversation toward rural economic development. “This is big and important stuff in the part of Ohio that I’m from,” he said on the show.

Back in his dining room in Bexley, Wilhelm mentions his next big project, a partnership he’s developing with the Wilds, the 10,000-acre animal preserve near Zanes-ville. Nothing is definite yet—and the details are sketchy at this point—but Wilhelm and Wilds executive director Evan Blumer have some ambitious ideas, including a five-star eco resort and a huge alternative energy and agriculture project. The plans fit into Wilhelm’s philosophy of “doing well and doing good” at the same time. “He’s a good vision guy,” Blumer says. “I don’t think he’s bound by a lot of the things that would stop people at first.”

Dave Ghose is an associate editor for Columbus Monthly.