That all changed in 1987, when, during his first year at the University of Evansville in Indiana, Elshami started dating a woman named Stacey. He credits this former girlfriend with changing his political views. "That was her doing; she was a true Democrat," he said in an interview with WhoRunsGov.com. "And I thank her for that every day."

And he has that opportunity as Elshami and Stacey are now married and are parents to daughters Jen and Layla and son Noah.

When Elshami graduated from Evansville with a degree in international business in 1991, he moved back to Nashville to wait tables. Stacey got a job teaching special education in Prince George's County, just outside of Washington, D.C. Elshami soon followed her.

The city fit with his interests. "The history of politics was fascinating for me," said Elshami, whose first significant encounter with American politics came when he returned to the U.S. for good from Egypt at the age of 12.

Key Hill Staffer

Elshami headed to the Hill, and found a paying job: working the afternoon shift in the Senate mail room. That left his morning's free to intern, first for Rep. Bob Clement (D-Tenn.) and then for Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-Pa.).

In 1994, he secured a full-time job in Sen. Barbara Boxer's (D-Calif.) office. But Elshami still couldn't quite escape the mail. His job was to respond to letters written to the senator from children, mostly from schools in Boxer's home state of California.

Soon, there was an opening in Boxer's press office, but Elshami had also been accepted to a graduate program in international transactions. The fledgling Hill aide faced a dilemma. "But I got the best advice I've ever gotten," he said. A senior member of Boxer's office told him, "You have a choice:" he could go to grad school or take the press assistant job and, "think of it as somebody paying you to get and education." He chose the latter and never regretted his decision.

Elshami eventually worked his way up to become Boxer's deputy press secretary and was deputy communications director for her 1998 re-election campaign.

In 1999, Elshami went to work for Illinois Democrat Rep. Jan Schakowsky as press secretary and deputy chief of staff. "I was really impressed with her values and what she stood for," he said of his first meeting with Schakowsky, whom he had not known before he interviewed for the job. "It was just one of those blind interviews, and I stayed six years."

Elshami took a few months leave in 2004 to work on the Up for Victory campaign. Elshami describes the goal of the campaign as "making sure that what happened in 2000 doesn't occur again." By that Elshami meant a situation like the one in which progressive voters supported independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader and, as Elshami saw it, siphoned votes from Democratic candidate Al Gore, throwing the race to George W. Bush.

Elshami next worked for another Illinois lawmaker, then-Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). He was hired as Durbin's national press secretary in 2005 and by the next year had been promoted to deputy communications director. In Durbin's office, Elshami worked with the Democratic leadership on message presentation, and prepared Durbin's weekly talking points.

"The stars were aligned, I think," Elshami said of the moment in 2007 when he was hired as deputy communications director in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) office, replacing Jennifer Crider, who is now at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

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