Cyrus Habib

Habib, now 38, announced that instead of being on the ballot in November for a second term as lieutenant governor, he would soon leave office to become a Roman Catholic priest. He became the lieutenant governor of the state of Washington at 35 and had reason to believe that he’d be governor someday, maybe even before he turned 40. His ascent impressed people all the more because of his disability. At the age of 8, he lost his sight: A rare cancer forced the removal of both of his retinas.He attended Columbia University. He won a Rhodes scholarship. He graduated from Yale Law. Ronan Farrow was his roommate at Yale Law. The two of them hung out there with their much older classmate Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose best-selling memoir, “Prozac Nation,” had been published a decade earlier. Habib’s parents immigrated to America from Iran. He was born here, their only child. He went to public schools in the Seattle suburbs. He didn’t merely win his first bid for the Washington House of Representatives in 2012 and then his first bid for the state’s Senate in 2014 and then his first bid for lieutenant governor in 2016. He established himself as an ace fund-raiser.