A 23-Year-Old Takes to Politics on the Fast Track

Andrea Jones began her 23rd birthday with a 7 a.m. breakfast at Philadelphia’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel and ended it in a suite at the Republican National Convention.

In between, she was interviewed by a columnist for the Washington Post, helped organize a press conference for a new television campaign, attended an invitation-only dinner for U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and appeared on a Webcast with Rep. Asa Hutchinson, an Arkansas Republican who helped impeach President Clinton last year.

“For the convention,” Jones said, “it was a pretty typical day.”

Just over a year ago, fresh out of Pepperdine University, about the most ambitious thing Jones had in mind was traveling cross-country. Then a casual conversation between McCain and Jones, daughter of California Secretary of State Bill Jones, led her on a dizzying path to politics.

Last year, McCain hired her to court the youth vote in his ultimately unsuccessful campaign for president.

Now, she is campaign manager for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Campbell, the San Jose congressman who is challenging Democratic incumbent Dianne Feinstein.

Jones’s job: Direct the day-to-day events of a campaign that is long on ideas and short on money. “I never thought I’d be doing this in a million years,” she said.

Jones weighs in on near- and long-term strategies for the campaign while focusing mostly on operations. “Making sure all the trains run on time,” she said.

Every day, from a small storefront office near Campbell Avenue in the Silicon Valley city of Campbell, the Campbell campaign’s field operations, scheduling, policy positions and media all--in one way or another--come under her scrutiny.

Is her ascension a fluke? Or is Jones the future of politics? Both, perhaps.

“I’ve been in my dad’s campaigns since I was 5,” she said, laughing. “But does that count?”

Early last year, Jones joined McCain’s campaign almost by chance. After a year at London’s Huron University studying international business, she returned to California, graduated from Pepperdine and volunteered for a voter outreach program in the secretary of state’s office.

She met McCain at a political fund-raiser.

“He said, ‘When are you going to work for me?’ ” Jones recalled. “And I said, ‘When are you going to hire me?’ ”

The next day, Jones was talking with one of McCain’s top staffers about signing on. She believed McCain’s message could better attract young voters with some retooling, especially on complex perennial issues, such as campaign finance reform.

“You need to package this differently for young people,” Jones remembers telling Mark Salter, McCain’s top aide and co-author of McCain’s biography. “When my dad heard what I had done, he said, ‘You said what?’ He just couldn’t believe I would immediately offer my own opinions like that.”

But her directness had made a favorable impression. Within days, she was working on McCain’s outreach efforts for young voters. Her career in politics was launched.

“I watched her go head to head with the Bush field organization, which had dozens of young people, and she fought them to a draw,” said former McCain advisor Dan Schnur. “She went to college campuses and sold them on a 63-year-old man who was in Vietnam before most of these kids were born.”

McCain credits Jones’ “infectious enthusiasm” with helping him forge an alliance with young voters.

“I would contact these people but she would do the real closing of the deal,” McCain said in an interview. “The message might have interested them. But she got them involved.”

Tall, blond, blue-eyed, Jones looks every bit the farm girl from Fresno. Truth is, she spent time on her family’s farm, picking cotton and riding horses, but grew up in a suburban neighborhood on the northwest side of the city.

Growing up, she said, her then-rancher father and schoolteacher mother taught her plenty about hard work and perseverance. “One thing I learned is that tenacity outweighs intelligence,” she said. “You’d rather have someone get the job done than someone who is brilliant and doesn’t get it done.”

After high school, she left for London and quickly learned about organizing her life.

A teacher there, noticing Jones dutifully make entries in a day planner, told her she should put it aside. “He said, ‘You’re 18 years old and anything you can’t remember to do is obviously not that important.’

“So I learned not to try and do 30 things in a day,” she said. “He taught me how to prioritize.”

The course of Campbell’s Senate campaign is decided by committee, and Jones takes part in strategy sessions with the candidate and consultants who are one or two generations her senior and hold formidable credentials.

She coordinates field directors, works with staff on the campaign Web site, assists the media experts responsible for promoting Campbell’s candidacy. Jones does all this with a dozen staffers--average age 26--who she says embody the future of politics.

The challenge, she said, is to engage young voters through a “completely different type of campaign” that builds on the sort of support McCain had among independents, many of them just old enough to vote.

“Energy is contagious, and that is what young people in politics really understand,” she said.

If her excitement suggests political naivete, a word of caution. Earlier this year, Washington Post political columnist Mary McGrory called Jones “the contemporary counterpart” of Sam Brown, the architect in 1968 of U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s stunning Vietnam War-driven challenge to President Lyndon B. Johnson.

“Andrea is a motivator and a high-energy person and somebody who is playing way above her head as a 23-year-old--and playing very well,” said George Gorton, a Campbell consultant who was national college director for Richard Nixon in 1972 and later worked for Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson.

“Amazingly enough,” he said, “she brings maturity to the campaign.”

That is not to say that she has been universally embraced. Some snickered when Jones was first brought aboard, convinced that her selection had more to do with her father’s position than her political skills. There was friction between Jones and a few Campbell insiders, largely over day-to-day operations. But those clashes have grown less frequent.

Jones said that when she and Campbell first sat down, the congressman knew she was related to the secretary of state but didn’t know--or care--precisely how.

“Look, I think you take every challenge as it comes,” Jones said. “. . . There will always be people, even on your own team, who try to tear you down.”

Her days, she says, begin with a 6:30 a.m. call from Baton Rouge-based media man Roy Fletcher. She leaves her apartment in Burlingame to arrive at the campaign office by 8:30, then begins a series of meetings, conference calls and round tables that, most days, last until early evening.

Most nights, she stays in the office until 9 or so, catching up on phone calls or e-mail. Then, she and some staffers might grab dinner at a local restaurant.

Until this summer, she never owned a television. And this year, she’s seen only two movies: “American Beauty” and “Autumn in New York.”

When she doesn’t finish the day reading campaign material, Jones says, she retires with books. Last month, she finished the best-selling “Left Behind” series, novels based on the Book of Revelation’s description of Earth’s final days.

Now, she’s tackling one on a topic decidedly closer to home--GOP strategist Ed Rollins’ book, “Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics.”

Mostly, Jones said, she is immersed in the campaign.

“For the first time in a long time, young people are really paying attention to the process,” she said. “And what I think young people are beginning to see is that they have the power to change the way things are.”

Not that it will be easy, said Jones, who acknowledges her own challenges.

“It is definitely difficult,” she said. “There are . . . a lot of personalities I didn’t realize I would deal with. But I am having fun. And if we can [bring] change, and change how the system works, and reinspire younger voters, then everything I do is worth it.”