Will Dunham’s grandfather lived to 101, survived World War Two and spent every summer dinner insisting that Barney Frank, his own congressman, wasn’t quite liberal enough.
That’s the house Will grew up arguing in. Not the Massachusetts summers with his grandfather. The other one, on a small farm in Ohio, where his parents were the crunchy, MAHA-before-it-was-a-hashtag kind of household, debating politics over dinner in a way that let nobody off easy.
“I had to know why I believed what I believed,” he told Brody and me this week. “I couldn’t just posit something. I had to be able to back it up.”
He’s President and CEO of the American Investment Council now, which means he spends his days defending a multi-trillion-dollar industry that most of Washington still doesn’t understand and, more often than not, doesn’t want to. Private equity is easy to be against. It’s the villain in a hundred campaign ads, the shorthand for everything wrong with modern capitalism, and Will’s job is to walk into rooms full of people who’ve already made up their minds and explain it anyway.
That’s not a new skill for him. That’s the dinner table.
What struck me, listening back, is how directly one connects to the other. He didn’t learn to argue policy on the Hill, though he spent fifteen years there, seven as Kevin McCarthy’s top policy staffer, sitting in on the four-corners negotiations with Pelosi and Schumer and McConnell. He learned it first at home, against people who loved him and disagreed with him anyway.
“The vast majority of private equity firms don’t have a government relations person. They don’t have a communications point person. They really are putting the private in private equity.”
That’s the gap he’s trying to close. Not with a bigger ad budget. With stories — a California company where longtime employees walked away with 30 months’ salary when it sold, a 70-year-old medical device maker that got its innovation back and an ice cream truck that turned into a hundred stores.
“34 million Americans in public pensions rely on private equity to secure their retirement.”
That’s the number that should reframe the argument, if anyone’s still listening by the time it gets said. It’s not a hedge fund story. It’s somebody’s mother, teaching third grade, counting on a pension that a private equity deal helped fund.
Will Dunham spent his childhood learning that being right and being understood are two different jobs. He’s still doing both.
Tune in Tuesday on YouTube to see the whole episode.