For Staffers, Upheaval Is a Campaign Promise That's Always Kept
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 28, 2007
Every four years it comes, like some celestial event -- inevitable and, apparently, irresistible: campaign season.
And with it, the hordes of otherwise reasonable human beings who desert their families, their jobs and their sleep patterns to join the fray -- and who know, even as they sign up, that havoc will immediately descend on their personal lives.
Collateral damage: Sean Noble missed his daughter's first dance recital. Jason Roe was in Boston when his wife needed consoling in Washington. Catherine Cameron is a newlywed, living alone.
"I just wished he was there to unpack the wedding gifts with me," Cameron says. But the morning after their honeymoon, her husband was gone -- back to Chicago, back to Obama.
So far, the 2008 presidential campaigns have employed more than 3,000 paid workers and countless volunteers, who will next year be joined by thousands of others working on congressional campaigns -- a legion of operatives living on four hours' sleep, Triple Whoppers and a hefty supply of Red Bull.
"These are greedy institutions," says Halcy Bohen, a psychologist who's counseled dozens of political types over her 27 years in Washington. "They eclipse everything else. Often the election work crowds out the family and the personal lives. And there are prices to pay."
For those who signed on early, it could mean almost two years of a schedule that's always in flux. Of never knowing what news story will break or emergency will need fixing in the middle of Mom and Dad's golden anniversary party. Of missing holiday dinners and siblings' homecomings and New Year's Eve kisses and opening presents under the tree.
"All I can say is thank God we live in the age of Internet shopping, 'cause that's the only way you can do it -- between the hours of midnight and 1 a.m.," says Mo Elleithee, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton who spent Christmas in Des Moines. "This is such a unique experience for everyone. Never before have the holidays been right on top of the Iowa caucuses -- usually there's a bit of a cushion."
Look at Jim Dornan, who's managed nine campaigns over the years, each time packing up to a new state, shipping his cats off to friends and putting whatever relationship he's in on pause. He points out his office window to the Old Post Office Pavilion, as if it sums up his transient existence: "I've had a mailbox over there for 10 years."
There's no mystery in Dornan's mind about why he's not married. "Everything you can't move you leave behind," he says. "I have honestly thought, how can I subject any woman to this?"
But most partners of die-hard campaigners know what they're getting into from the start. Catherine Cameron did. She met Emmett Beliveau seven years ago when they were both working to elect Al Gore, and she liked Beliveau as much for his competence as his kindness.
She always knew it was a matter of "when, not if" he would hear the siren call of another campaign. When he popped the question last Christmas, Beliveau was an associate with a D.C. law firm, available for dinners out and Sunday matinees. Three weeks later, Barack Obama's team called. Beliveau spent most of their engagement in Chicago, as he has the first months of their marriage. The two have never lived together.
"It's not ideal, but we're making it work," says Cameron, taking a sip of wine on what happened to be Beliveau's 31st birthday. She had cupcakes delivered to him for the occasion. There is always a "next visit" planned and the couple talk several times a day, conversations they jokingly call "business transactions": " 'Did you pay this bill?' 'Do you remember tomorrow's your mom's birthday?' "
None of it is the way she thought her first year of marriage would be, but it came down to this: "He got a great job. And he's really good at it. How do you tell the person you love, the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, 'No, you can't do this.' "
That's one question the campaign couples who end up on psychologist Michael Radkowsky's couch end up asking. Others include: "What does it say about me that I want to leave my family for six weeks?" "What does it say about me that my partner wants to leave me for two months?"
Part of what it says, he tells clients, is that individual goals still matter, even in the context of a family. "If you make your relationship your only priority, or even your top priority, it can limit your potential as a human being," he says.
Plus, Radkowsky adds, campaign junkies constitute a certain breed. While campaigns snap up hordes of young people -- in their 20s, single and kidless, full of energy -- only a few become addicted. Those are the ones who will tell you campaigns are ingrained in their being. They feed off the pressure and competition and the ideal -- the belief that they can impact society more profoundly doing this than any other job.
"It's in my blood," says Sean Noble. He is 37 years old, chief of staff to Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.). He also has five children and over the years has taken leave from his job to work on 20 different campaigns, at all levels.
His wife, Julie, is pretty much a single mom when he's gone. And he's gone a lot. He takes vacation time to work on campaigns. His family takes vacation time, sometimes, to go see him work on campaigns. "I haven't burned out yet, much to the chagrin of my wife."
"You just have to suck it up and say, 'That's who I married and that's what I'm giving to my marriage -- my support,' " says Julie Noble, on the phone from their home in Phoenix. "It was really hard, though. It took a lot of nice discussions for me to get to this point."
"It's not been without a struggle," her husband concedes. He's not on a campaign now, but almost certainly will be by next summer. "It would be ridiculous to pretend that this kind of activity doesn't put a strain on marriages. And I can't imagine doing this if my wife didn't support me the way that she does and believe in the things that I do."
That helps -- that she believes what he believes. They're Mormon and he works for conservative candidates -- "so for us, it's fighting right against wrong," she says.
It helps. But there are still times it doesn't feel worth it.
"It's really hard when you know the candidate's probably not going to win," she adds. "And they're still gone 24/7 and you just think, what is the point?"
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.
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