Dan Schnur is a political communications strategist and the director of the University of Southern California’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics. Before participating in a panel on the effects that redistricting will have on California, he sat down and took questions in our Green Room.
Q. What food do you eat most often?
A. Chocolate.
Q. What is your guilty pleasure?
A. Chocolate.
Q. What is your favorite technological gadget?
A. TiVo.
Q. What are you afraid of?
A. Nothing.
Q. What’s your favorite part of your job?
A. Helping young people decide that they want to get involved in public service, and helping them do it. And chocolate.
Q. What would you do with a million extra dollars?
A. I’m trying to decide whether to be altruistic or honest. I would split it. I would spend half of it expanding the program that we do at the Institute of Politics and expanding our scholarship and internship programs. And I’d spend the other half on a really nice addition to my house.
Q. What time do you start working in the morning?
A. Probably about 5. Not at the office, don’t get me wrong.
Q. What is the best advice you ever received?
A. Don’t take a job because of what other people will say and what it will look like, take the job because it’s what you want to do. And I only ignored that advice three times.
Q. Who do you think is the most unsung hero in history?
A. George Marshall, for keeping Europe together.
Q. What was the last great book you read?
A. How about the last really good book I read? Notes From the Cracked Ceiling by Anne Kornblut from the Washington Post on Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and the year of the woman in politics in 2008.
Q. If you had a different profession in another life, what would it be?
A. Probably professional basketball player, but that would involve being quite a bit taller and a lot more coordinated.
Read more about the panel in which Schnur participated.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.