Invite all your frens
We're having roasted goat for dinner tonight.
New York, NY–August 27, 2007– Abe Goldschmidt (’07) is just 22 years old, but by the time he became a White House intern, he was already a seasoned veteran of the electoral process. Goldschmidt was bitten by the bug early and had already worked in the second Bloomberg mayoral campaign and in the ill-fated gubernatorial campaign of former New York State Assemblyman John Faso (defeated by Eliot Spitzer in 2006) by the time the White House phoned. Goldschmidt sees politics in its most beneficent guise– as “a way to help people.” Currently, in between classes at Baruch’s School of Public Affairs, he’s pitching in to help the presidential campaign of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. “Obviously, I’m a Republican and proud of it,” he says
A personable young man who likes golf and talk radio, Goldschmidt grew up in Brooklyn’s Midwood section in a close-knit conservative family. Two of his three brothers also attended Baruch College, which Abe praises for the “flexible schedule and evening hours” that enabled him to take advantage of a variety of internships, mostly unpaid, mostly in politics. At Baruch, he founded what he says was the College’s first undergraduate Republican Club. (“I was surprised to learn there had never been one”), but is hesitant to declare himself a candidate for future political office.
According to Abe, applying for the prestigious and highly competitive White House internship was “straightforward,” if not exactly easy. Last August, he downloaded the application from the White House web site, filled it out, and faxed it in. Later, there was an interview, letters of reference and a background check. Et voila! A month or so later he got a call. Shortly after that, he was on his way to intern in the corridors of power, where he was dispatched to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Abe worked in the Office of Political Affairs and, to his surprise, White House interns weren’t used to fetch coffee. “I would go through 23 to 27 newspapers every day,” Abe recalls. He describes the briefs he drafted on a variety of domestic issues as “substantive.”
Abe Goldschmidt considers himself very lucky to have had the White House internship experience. A “New York kid, all the way,” he found himself making friends with students from Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama. “It gave me a whole new perspective,” he says. Though not wholly sure what graduation will bring, Abe is studying for the LSATs. “Law school is definite,” he says, citing an ambition that dates back to yet another internship, this one in the office of Brooklyn district attorney Charles Hynes.