NYT: As Campaign Drags On, Aides Put Personal Lives on Hold

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As Campaign Drags On, Aides Put Lives on Hold

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: March 17, 2008

There is the abandoned $1,000-a-month temporary apartment in Des Moines, littered with dirty T-shirts and a deflated air mattress. The campaign aide whose 105-degree fever sent her to the hospital. The neglected fiancée in New York who handed down an ultimatum: Take a weekend off — or else.

The campaign of 2008 has sustained more than a few casualties.

Months ago, reporters and campaign staff members braced themselves for a drawn-out battle for the Democratic nomination. The staffs of Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton started the new year with high energy and the sure belief that they faced six intense weeks of high-octane campaigning, but that life would return to normal while snow was still on the ground.

It didn’t.

The coast-to-coast nominating contests on Feb. 5 came and went, and all but eight states, and Puerto Rico and Guam, have voted. Yet both campaigns are realizing that the grueling pace that has dominated the race so far is apparently not letting up anytime soon.

“I don’t think there’s any evidence that things will slow down,” said Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton. “Anytime that you think there’s going to be a lull, you’re wrong.”

Lives are on hold. Jamie Smith, a traveling press secretary for Mrs. Clinton, was married on New Year’s Eve in Chicago, drove the next day to Iowa to pick up the campaign — and has been on the road almost every day since.

At least she had her wedding. In November, Jay Carson, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, had to postpone his because of the campaign. Then his girlfriend asked him to pick a week when he was “absolutely sure the primary would be done” for wedding-planning travel in California and Oregon, Mr. Carson said in an e-mail message.

So he picked last week. “Shows what I know,” he wrote.

They went anyway. The added bonus, he wrote, was that he was able to spend time with his girlfriend, “who I haven’t really spent more than 24 hrs with in 8 mos.”

Down time is rare. Many aides hesitate when asked the last time they took a day off.

Continue Reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/us/politics/17fatigue.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=politics