In what has somehow been nearly a decade and a half spent as a political journalist, I’ve encountered a lot of election cycle twists. But the one thing I never quite expected was for my boss to run for Congress.

Perhaps I should have. After all, if there is anyone who was born to be a political candidate, it is my former editor at the Daily Beast, John Avlon. As a speechwriter for then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Avlon painstakingly composed the eulogies of first responders who died on Sept. 11. He went on to become a centrist columnist and co-founded the fledging post-partisan political organization now known as No Labels. He was well-dressed, articulate, and telegenic. To most people around the office, he was just “John”—but to those who knew him from his past at Milton Academy or Yale, he went by “Fip.”

Avlon played a formative role in my career in journalism. In fact, I feel comfortable saying that if it were not for him, I might be pursuing a more rational and lucrative kind of work. I never intended to become a reporter. But through a series of coincidences and odd luck, I ended up in the New York newsroom of the Daily Beast in the winter of 2012 when America was transfixed by a vicious Republican primary, mostly a battle between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.

Avlon was a columnist then, coming in and out of the newsroom in a Frank Gehry building on West Side Highway to appear on something called Daily Beast TV, which was before its time in providing little-watched online video-news segments where reporters and contributors pontificated on the headlines. (Long before other newsrooms spent millions of dollars pivoting to video, only to fail and pivot back, Daily Beast editor-in-chief Tina Brown was ahead of the game.) I gained Avlon’s attention as a workhorse, going through sheets and sheets of precinct numbers, trying to see if Ron Paul’s anti-war message had helped him among Arab American voters in Dearborn, Michigan. (It hadn’t.) But Avlon was impressed by devotion to some of the basic spadework of political journalism at a time when flash and celebrity were a big part of the game.

I then got laid off by the Daily Beast but was eventually rehired, thanks to Avlon, who rose in rank to run the publication for half a decade. I embarked upon a role as his factotum in Washington. I wrote, I edited, and I managed personalities during a Wild West period for the publication as it transitioned into the scrappy online tabloid it remained for many years. Avlon, an editor of two collections of “America’s greatest newspaper columns,” cherished the idea of a publication that was “non-partisan but neutral,” in the spirit of New York journalism legends of the craft (like Jimmy Breslin), and was fixated on “scoops, scandals and stories about secret worlds.” These mantras were so important to him that he had them painted on walls in the New York office.

Before Avlon announced that he was running for Congress as a Democrat in New York’s 1st Congressional District against first-term incumbent Republican Nick LaLota, he had long since left the Daily Beast for a television career on CNN as an earnest centrist pundit. His appearances were billed as a “Reality Check”: He spoke about the news of the day soberly, using history to “make sense of the present.” (He is also the author of books like Lincoln and the Fight for Peace and Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations.)

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