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TODAY o November 3, 2000
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Young Atlanta adviser has Bush's ear on education
Saeed Ahmed - Staff
Friday, November 3, 2000
George W. Bush has said that, should he be elected president, his first piece of legislation would deal with education reform. If so, the person helping him write it could be an Atlanta native who is barely 25 years old.
Meet Sarah Youssef, the education policy analyst for the Bush campaign. At an age when her peers are in graduate school or a few years into their first jobs, this Lovett School graduate is drafting policy statements for the Republican nominee and briefing him on what he has called his "No. 1 domestic issue."
Youssef helped Bush prepare for the presidential debates, and --- although she is reluctant to admit it --- she played a key role in convincing him to include a voucher program in his education platform and increase spending on Pell Grants, the need-based grant that undergraduates receive when they file for federal financial aid.
"It's kind of intimidating sometimes to have this level of access to power at such a young age," says Youssef, who is just three years out of college, "but it's no longer really an anomaly in campaigns."
Indeed, Youssef is not the only fresh-faced neophyte advising the candidates in this year's race.
The average age of Bush policy staff members is 32.
Vice President Al Gore's camp boasts half a dozen twentysomething analysts in its ranks. Among them is another Atlantan, 28-year-old Sarah Bianchi, who is Gore's deputy domestic policy adviser.
"What we lack in experience, we make up for with a strength of conviction and boundless energy to do whatever needs to be done to see our man win," Youssef says.
For her, that means a workday that often begins before dawn and runs past midnight. Pulling all-nighters is so common that she keeps a toothbrush in her desk drawer.
Working out of her office in "wonk nirvana" --- three rows of cubicles that the policy staff occupies in Bush's Austin, Texas, headquarters --- Youssef typically answers about 300 e-mails a day. She fields queries on education issues from the campaign's regional offices and vets speeches for Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney.
And when the unexpected occurs, such as last week's release of a report questioning Bush's claims on education achievements in Texas --- she helps launch the counteroffensive designed to stem the damage.
"You have to be able to juggle a lot of things at once and still give them your full dedication," she says of her job. "At the same time, you don't want to be so bogged down that you miss an episode of 'Inside Politics.' "
Youssef calls Bush a "policy soulmate." She has such respect for his world view and management style, she says, that "sometimes I just get misty-eyed because I am so proud to be working for this man."
For his part, the governor has called Youssef personally on and off the campaign trail more than a dozen times. In a handwritten note to her parents this week, he praised the difference she is making to his team.
Youssef was born in Sydney, Australia, but moved to Atlanta soon afterward. The daughter of an Egyptian father and an Australian mother, she stills retains her Australian citizenship although she has a green card that allows her to work in the States.
"Isn't that awfully ironic?" she asks. "Here I am working on policy that will affect millions of Americans and I can't even vote?" Youssef says she didn't always subscribe to the concept of "compassionate conservatism," as Bush describes his philosophy. But she says she believes the seeds were planted while she was in high school.
As a student at the Lovett School, where she was voted most likely to succeed --- Youssef served as a mentor for children at Techwood Homes, a housing project that has since been torn down.
"Some of the kids would stuff a basketball inside their T-shirts and say, 'Let's play welfare office,' pretending to be pregnant single mothers," Youssef says. "That's when I realized that the system that had been created to help these children was holding them down and offering no hope for them to emerge from the cycle of poverty."
Her conservative beliefs were cemented at the University of North Carolina --- where she majored in journalism and international studies, and where she earned the nickname "Grandma" for her tendency to choose studying over partying --- and during a study-abroad stint in the Middle East.
"I went in as very much an idealist," she says. "I came back a realist, although I still believe there is a hope for increased democracy in the Middle East."
After college, she put in two years at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, until she was asked by the Bush campaign to come on board as an analyst. She did, scrapping her plans to attend the London School of Economics for graduate study.
Now Youssef, once a classically trained singer and an avid long-distance runner, spends 18-hour workdays fueled by peanut M&Ms and protein drinks.
As the campaign winds down, she is optimistic that Bush will win the White House, but she is reluctant to talk about her plans after the election.
She says she set four goals for herself after college. Come Tuesday, she will have met half of them: She has run a marathon and worked on a campaign. Next, it's either graduate school or a trek up Mount Kilimanjaro.
"But first, when this is all over, I will just try to rest," Youssef says. "You're talking to a person who hasn't slept much in her 25 years."
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