Deseret News readers were introduced last month to the Coloradan gubernatorial candidate Doug Robinson, a husband, father of five and a successful Republican businessman who also happens to be Gov. Mitt Romney’s nephew.

Few, however, are familiar with Levi Tillemann, a scion from yet another of Mormondom’s most fascinating political families who announced this week that he’s vying for Colorado’s 6th Congressional District.

A wunderkind clean-energy consultant and a former Department of Energy adviser for the Obama administration, Tillemann hopes to unseat the district's Republican incumbent, U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman. Armed with a Yale degree and a Johns Hopkins Ph.D., the 35-year-old Democrat announced an exploratory committee this week and plans to begin a listening tour throughout the community.

So why might Tillemann run?

He says he doesn’t like the direction the nation is headed.

But, of course, many people are frustrated with the state of the nation and very few actually go out and run for Congress.

The difference, it seems, is that Tillemann comes from a long line of fearless doers.

Indeed, paging through Tillemann’s family history is like pulling out the Von Trapp family scrapbook. That is if the Von Trapps were Jewish, not Catholic, and if, after coming to America, they converted to Mormonism and turned their attention not simply to music — Tillemann’s TED-talking sister is an operatic soprano — but also to politics, human rights, innovation and philanthropy.

Tillemann’s maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust.

His grandfather, Tom Lantos, was the only survivor to serve in Congress and did so for some 14 terms. Lantos was also a founding member of the Human Rights Caucus.

As if that weren’t pedigree enough, Tillemann’s paternal grandmother, Nancy Dick, served as the first female lieutenant governor of Colorado.

Still with me?

Great, because there’s more:

His older brother was a senior adviser to both Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. His aunt, Katrina Lantos Swett, served two separate stints as chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and his uncle, Richard Swett, was also a congressman from New Hampshire in the 1990s.

Tillemann’s parents both graduated from Yale — so too did five of his brothers and sisters. His family holds the record for the most siblings to graduate from the storied ivy-league school (at least that’s according to a Yale graduation speech delivered by none other than their close family friend, former Vice President Joe Biden).

Oh, and I almost forgot, Tillemann’s mother, Annette, was part of the first freshmen class of women admitted to Yale, and she home-schooled the whole family. Tillemann’s dad was an inventor and an LDS bishop who supported the massive clan in their blue-collar Denver community.

Whether it was finding an engineering solution or a political one, the Tillemann family never accepted circumstances passively.

It’s part of their heritage.

When the Nazi forces invaded Hungary, the then-16-year-old Tom Lantos was arrested and put into a labor camp. He fled. He was caught, and he was beaten.

So, he fled again. This time he escaped.

That story, and so many others, seem to define the family values that animate Tillemann’s desire to now enter politics. When he perceives an injustice, he acts. When he doesn’t like the circumstances around him, he aims to change things.

The Tillemanns don’t just vote, they run.

Which brings us back to Levi Tillemann. Central to his philosophy is that people don’t succeed merely on the principle of self-reliance. They need help from society to become productive citizens.

This seems cogent enough coming from a pragmatic-minded Democrat.

Yet the talking point belies the fact that everything about his own life and that of his siblings and family — many of whom entered college in their mid-teens on scholarships — screams self-reliance, pull-your-self-up-by-your-bootstraps-ism.

His grandparents arrived in America with less than nothing and became some of the most influential politicos of their generation.

His parents raised and schooled 11 well-acclimated children and housed dozens of foreign exchange students, and his brother once made national headlines for staying up several days straight to mediate an inter-agency tussle and craft a speech for the secretary of state.

Tillemann himself earned a scholarship to college at age 15.

But the would-be candidate seems sincere when discussing his concerns with the nation’s trajectory. When he looks at Washington, he doesn’t see the kind of pragmatic solution-oriented government that America deserves, he says.

A polyglot who speaks Japanese (he served an LDS mission in Japan), Spanish, Chinese and Portuguese, he’s equally eclectic when talking politics — spouting political philosophy in one sentence and then expounding on the best practices of political processes in the next.

Two issues of central concern to him are automation and clean energy.

“Regarding issues such as clean energy, health care and automation, we need pragmatists in politics who are willing to thoroughly study the issues, find solutions and then monitor their success to see how they perform and then be willing to make changes and improvements based on feedback,” he says.

“We need an iterative political process, but right now we have polarized partisanship, and the parties are not interested in finding pragmatic solutions to the nation’s pressing problems.”

While you’re unlikely to see Tillemann attending a local Latter-day Saint congregation these days, he nonetheless credits his Mormon upbringing and his Latter-day Saint family with some of his most cherished values, especially his belief in the importance of community and the need for families and individuals of all different backgrounds to come together to help each other become better, more productive citizens.

That was the ethos of the congregation in which he was raised. Now, he’d like to bring that philosophy to the nation’s capital.