Electing a Life on the Run

For the record, psychologist Bohen never sees an uptick in clientele during election season. That comes after, she says, in a "fallout" when people ask themselves if it was really worth it.

For Jason Roe and his wife, Patty, it wasn't. Not this time, anyway. They met in Michigan as college kids and moved to Washington to follow his dream. Fifteen years, nine campaigns. They know the routine -- the months apart, the lonely evenings, the phone calls that go unreturned for hours.

Mitt Romney's team called last winter and the routine became pre-dawn flights to Boston on Monday, return trips late Friday night. Patty stayed in Washington, to continue her job as chief of staff for Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), and to sell their old house. But the house wouldn't sell and Renzi came under FBI investigation.

"She's at home crying every night and I'm in Boston," Roe says. So three months after he joined the campaign, he left it.

"When I walked in and saw him sitting on the couch, it was one of the best moments of our marriage," recalls Patty Roe.

Jessica Vanden Berg bowed out, too -- for the moment, anyway. At 23, the Iowa native was hired to work on the 1998 campaign for a local congressman. Over the next nine years she worked on more than 15 races, lived in a different place for every one of them and once spent a year carrying everything she needed in two bags.

"You might guess, I'm not married," she jokes. But now, for the first time in her adult life, she's been at the same address for more than a year, having co-founded a political consulting firm that keeps her -- mostly -- in town.

"I have furniture now," she says. "It's nice."

It's nice, too, because it's stable. Campaigns have the habit of leaving workers jobless after Election Day, often with a sizable dent in their bank accounts. Precious few are in this for the money.

Or the work-life balance.

Get them going and any campaign veteran can rattle off tales of illicit entanglements that smolder along the sidelines of the trail. The newlywed on one campaign who's already cheating on an unsuspecting spouse. The married journeyman campaigner who feared his affair with a state party worker would damage his career, not to mention his home life. The fiancee who learned, just before her wedding day, that her intended strayed three times while out on the road.

Passion thrives, after all, in the campaign hothouse -- bubbling up amid the intensity and the drinking, the camaraderie and commiseration. Everyone on a campaign is in it together; and sometimes they wind up in bed together, too.

So has a marriage or two been destroyed by these things?

"Many," says Bohen.

But, of course, marriages have also been created. Washington is filled with stories of election-cycle love. And thus with couples who are both in the business -- a situation that brings its own drawbacks and advantages.

"There is an understanding of the pressures and the difficulties and the long hours," explains Howard Wolfson, communications director for Hillary Clinton.

"But one of the disadvantages is the long hours on both ends," adds his wife, Terri McCullough, chief of staff for Nancy Pelosi. The pair have a 2-year-old daughter, so, "in terms of our family life, we always have to be very careful of comparing our calendars."

Ballet class on Saturday is a priority. So are the powerful women they each serve.

"It would not be unreasonable for someone to object to the demands of our work," Wolfson says. "But in this instance both people are very familiar with what it means to get a phone call at midnight -- and why if you get one, it's important to take it."

Consuming -- that's the word most campaigners use to describe their work. Consuming, all-encompassing, exhausting.

But there's one crucial word that makes it (mostly) tolerable. It's temporary.

"That's the best thing about a campaign, there's a light at the end of the tunnel," says Patty Roe, who's seen her husband through his nine campaigns and run one herself. "No matter if you won or lost, you're still happy it's over. You're happy to have your life back. You're happy to have your mate back."

At least until next time.