Dean, Party of One
Even After Hours, The Front-Runner's Staff Prefers to Hang Alone
By Hanna Rosin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page C01
One in a series of reports on the New Hampshire primary campaign.
MANCHESTER, N.H.
It's New Year's Eve and the tap is open. The Edwards people, with Budweisers in hand, crowd the section of bar closest to the pool tables. Nearby, some Lieberman interns sway/dance, free Bacardi Bat necklaces swinging on their necks. Someone from Gephardt's campaign is lighting a Camel Light, and the Clark guys are scattered near the TV screens.
In the smoky haze of Raxx Billiards, representatives from all but one of the major Democratic presidential campaigns can be found.
"They were invited," says Sen. Joe Lieberman's New Hampshire director, Peter Greenberger, who helped put the party together. As usual, though, the Dean people didn't come.
The unofficial rules for the young staff who work the New Hampshire primary have always been thus: By day they are rivals, press secretaries out-spinning each other, field directors fighting for every vote, interns standing at busy traffic corners holding their campaign posters, shouting each other down. But half an hour from midnight, they are fellow partiers, bumming cigarettes, buying each other beers, bound by the weird facts of their daily existence: long, long days, addiction to campaign adrenaline, month-to-month leases.
This year, however, the rest of the staffs complain that Howard Dean's people don't play by those rules. Stop by the Strange Brew or the Wild Rover in downtown Manchester late on a Friday or Saturday night and you're likely to find any combination of Democratic staffers drinking, letting off steam, talking about anything other than work. But to the great annoyance of everyone else, the Dean people are almost never there.
"Off the record, none of the Dean people are coming," staffers from three campaigns make sure to point out in the hours before the New Year's Eve party. This is not technically true. Two Dean staffers, including Delana Jones, the candidate's regional field director, who rooms with someone from Sen. John Edwards's staff, did show up early. But still the perception, expressed at one Friday night drinking fest after another, remains: "I have friends from all the other campaigns, but I don't know anyone from Dean's," says a press secretary for a rival campaign. "The Dean people don't party with us."
In campaigns past the comity thrived for a practical reason. Everyone knows that only one candidate will get the nomination, and whoever he is, staffers for the other candidates might want to work for him. So hanging out together serves as a casual form of networking, a tacit understanding that rivalries fade and ultimately staffers for rival campaigns have more in common than not.
But this year seems different. "I've done a cursory survey of my staff," says one campaign official. "None of them would go work for Dean. They hate the guy. His arrogance. The things he says. The way he insults us, like he's the only one who's a real Democrat."
Of course, some of this is swagger. Even this staffer admits, "I can't imagine it now, but who knows, a year from now."
Some is spinoff from the intense emotions around a campaign. "These are young kids in the midst of their first love affair," says Dayton Duncan, a longtime Democratic activist who wrote a book on the New Hampshire primary. "They can't conceive they would ever fall in love again." Also, adds Duncan, in years such as this one, when the field is crowded, "you usually get a coalition of the underdogs."
At the same time, "what's going on with the Dean campaign is different than the other years," Duncan says. Because Dean was such a long shot a year ago, he couldn't get any of the professional local operatives to work for him, so he had to assemble a staff from amateurs and newcomers. Add to that what happened this summer, when he started to "catch on and assumed a cultlike status among young people who were into politics for the first time," Duncan says, and you get a full-blown culture clash.
The result is "folks who don't see themselves in the normal way, who are less likely to say, 'What you do in a campaign is hang out and go to bars with the other campaign staffs,' " says Duncan, who has endorsed Dean. "A lot of them don't aspire to be political operatives. They see themselves as different; they keep to themselves. In turn, the aspiring professionals see them as different. And in that difference is the rub."
In the August softball tournament finals between the staffs of Dean and John Kerry, Dean called in nearly every 10 minutes for results. The stakes went far beyond the diamond: "We had them down 13-2 and they came back to win," Dean wrote his staff after they lost. "They will be just as determined on Jan. 27. This time however the result will be different."
The other campaigns talk about the Dean people with the same mix of condescension and envy that one might use toward an overeager colleague who just doesn't understand when to turn it off.
"I'm sure they think they're starting a revolution," says one press secretary for a rival campaign. "Just like when I was in college, and I used to listen to Rage Against the Machine a lot, and I thought I was starting a revolution, too."
If the Dean faction exists at the get-togethers, it's in the negative, the gaping hole you can't ignore. If they're not here, where are they? Are they still working? This late? What does their office look like? Do they really sleep in their cars? How many of them are there, anyway?
One Friday night at the Strange Brew, Dean pops up on the news and staffers from two rival campaigns begin booing. Soon the mocking gets transparently bitter: "Woo-hoo. I bet it's Mardi Gras all the time over there. Party on, pass the organic peanut butter."
In guessing what the Dean people might be doing New Year's Eve, Mark Kornblau, press secretary for Kerry, sticks to the techno-geek stereotype. "Blogging," he jokes, mock-tapping his fingers on an air keyboard.
In fact, the Dean campaign's New Year's Eve plans do involve blogging in a small way. The Dean campaign sent its invitation in the form of a rap, weaving in many campaign themes with lots of blogged responses at the bottom.
Wednesday we will get on track
And take this goddamn country back
27 days to phone the masses
Just 1 night left to shake our asses
It's the last night we will rock the nation
Until H Dean's inauguration.
The Dean party is held at a rowhouse shared by six staffers and on any given night up to 20 others, who crash on one side of a mattress or on one of the mismatched sofa cushions, courtesy of the Salvation Army. The party is "semi half formal," the invitation says, which means "fancy shoes with a baseball hat" or "boxers and tie," which would make it difficult to skip out and go to another party.
The house is known in the office as the "frat," but more accurately it's like a frat the morning after rush. Every horizontal surface doubles as a place to store beer, unopened or not. Most of the bedrooms have a damp, funky smell. One of the inhabitants is known as "anal" merely because he hangs some of his clothes on a makeshift plastic contraption.
Objects exist in dada arrangements mostly on the floor. There's a copy of "What It Takes," Richard Ben Cramer's book on the 1988 campaign, with a Cheez Doodle as a bookmark; a Dean pamphlet titled "Take the Country Back" on a stained ironing board; below it a tipped-over glass that's spilled some kind of reddish liquid, left there for history. The refrigerator magnets spell D-E-A-N-I-E.
Around 10:30 p.m., Rachel Sobelson emerges from one of the rooms like Venus from her slimy shell, fixing the straps of her dress, her sandy curls not yet tied up, impervious to the funk around her. At work in the decaying warehouse that serves as the campaign headquarters, she's the office manager who can fix any problem. "She does everything," says Karen Hicks, the state director, "and she's 19."
Sobelson doesn't live here but "I stay here a lot," she says. This is her first dorm and the campaign is her campus. When asked if she might need a night away from her colleagues, the question does not even compute with her.
"This is the best party I could ever imagine. Rarely do you get so many people you like and get along with."
"It's fate," she adds, "like so much of the campaign. It's fate that I saw Howard Dean speak. It's fate that I was in New Hampshire. It's fate that I got to the campaign so early and ended up with so much responsibility."
Sobelson is talking over the noise in the Frattic, the packed attic space where the party has drifted, where on most nights two people sleep on Aerobeds that can be easily deflated and moved aside. The side table is a mess of empty beer bottles and chips that no one bothered to drop into a bowl. All around is Dean paraphernalia rejiggered, yard signs turned into party hats, Dean shirts slashed and beaded.
Suddenly Sobelson is interrupted by a wave of slow clapping that builds in intensity, the same kind of inspiration clap the Dean staff does at the office. What will happen at midnight?
"Many Dean claps, some serious Dean clapping," says Sobelson, "chanting, singing, clapping, you never know. "
At Raxx, midnight approaches. The bar is next door to the Lieberman headquarters on Elm Street, the main Manchester drag where nearly all the campaigns are housed. In the dark, Elm Street could be anywhere. You can't see the pawnshops and consignment stores and sink and toilet bowl displays that serve as the staffers' daily backdrops.
The jukebox plays '80s heavy-metal music such as AC/DC and Metallica, music that serves to highlight that these 20- and 30-year-olds belong more to each other than they do to this pool hall in working-class Manchester. Some are from New Hampshire and know each other from former governor Jean Shaheen's failed Senate campaign two years ago; some know each other from the Hill in Washington; still others worked at public relations firms in New York.
They have to be somewhat cautious around each other and usually avoid talking about work, except in the most general terms. But that's part of what makes such gatherings a psychic relief.
"We're tired, we've been burning the candle at both ends," says Kristin Carvell, press secretary for Lieberman. "I love the people I work with but we're together all day. I get coffee with them and lunch with them and eat dinner with them. At the end of the day it's nice to see someone else."
Kathy Roeder, press secretary for Rep. Dick Gephardt, agrees: "It would be a mistake to be here for six months and not make new friends." For them the campaign is just as intense as for the Deanies.
"You forget your whole life," says Roeder, in her case meaning her mom's birthday, dad's retirement, Thanksgiving, Christmas. "We campaign people have a special bond," she says.
Work seeps into this party, too. When a news report shows a Lieberman supporter on the hanging TV screens, and later a Clark ad, the respective parties cheer. But they are all mocked mercilessly for not leaving it at the office. Then all heads turn to the TV when the ball drops in Times Square. Everyone raises a glass and the hugs and kisses are indiscriminate.
After midnight, staffers from three campaigns sit around a table chewing over the usual subject. This time, it's outrage at Dean's statement that many of his supporters might not vote for a Democrat if he doesn't win the nomination.
Bars here close at 1 tonight, so they don't have much time. Also this might be the last night like this. The New Hampshire campaign is heading into its final stretch; everyone will be crazy busy and pretty soon the underdogs might have to go after each other harder, straining the easy rapport.
In the corner, some Clark interns are singing David Allen Coe's "You Never Even Call Me by My Name," playing on the jukebox.
Well, I was drunk the day my Mom got outta prison.
And I went to pick her up in the rain.
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned old train.
Just after 1 the last holdouts walk out the door, heading to their bare temporary apartments. Some guys standing around Elm Street attempt to sell them something out of a paper bag, but it looks empty.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company |
