A Trickle-Down Change of Fortunes : While their bosses get all the attention, minor players in the Bush Administration worry about what’s next for them. But for potential Clinton appointees, job prospects couldn’t be much brighter.

Straight out of college, Charlie Ingersoll came to work in the White House under Ronald Reagan almost a decade ago. And he stayed. He’s still a political appointee, currently working for the U.S. Information Agency as a liaison to the Bush White House. Never before has the 31-year-old had to compete for a private-sector job in the real world.

Until now.

“All of a sudden, I have to make an adult decision,” muses Ingersoll, whose wife also is a Bush political appointee. “Most people start off in small towns, in committees and local politics before they get to Washington. We came to Washington first. It might be fun to go back to a small town, get a dog and try it the other way.”

He may see it as fun, but not everyone in the same fix will. Some 2,500 mid-level political appointees, many of whom have reveled in 12 years of Republican rule, are about to discover a harsh reality: impending unemployment in a tough economy.

Many of them who came here as virtual youngsters now have spouses, children and mortgages to worry about. And, unlike their more senior counterparts, they don’t have high-powered law or public-relations firms eager to welcome them back.

“I’m out of a job in less than three months, and I’m a little nervous,” says Gerald Koenig, who worked in the Reagan White House until Bush’s election, left for two years, then returned to Washington in 1990 to a Pentagon post. “But, heck, if I were interested in security, I never would have gotten into a business as volatile as politics.”

Adds Liz Prestridge, spokeswoman for the National Space Council: “It’s a little bit like being a manic-depressive. You have to suffer through the low periods to get to the high periods. This is not a lifestyle a lot of people are suited for.”

Suited or not, thousands of Washingtonians choose that lifestyle and place their fortunes on a parallel track with the fortunes of the candidates they support. Many, like Koenig and Ingersoll, start early, volunteering in campaigns and working their way up. And they are rewarded for their efforts with plum federal jobs.

These are the political appointees, and they toil hand in hand with civil servants, who survive no matter who wins an election. Indeed, frequently the biggest problem the civil servants have is breaking in the new political appointees, who often become their bosses.

From this vantage point, the fall can be a long one, acknowledges Koenig, who intends to go back to the private sector but is unsure whether he can match his $65,000 annual income.

“It may be a little painful as far as expectations,” he says. “Or there might be a great position that might involve moving someplace. But that’s life. You just go forward. I’d be very disappointed in myself if I found myself terrified about finding a job outside politics.

“A lot of my peers have become comfortable here and never visualized you can be defeated,” he adds. “But just because you’re on the side of the angels doesn’t mean the electorate will be. I know a lot of people who haven’t done anything else in their lives, and they’re going to have a tough time.”

While Republican loyalists ponder their uncertain futures, Democrats are doing the same thing--but in a far different frame of mind. Their collective heart is beating faster at the prospect of more prestigious jobs in a new Democratic Administration.

“We’re all just pinching ourselves,” says Margaret Goodman, 45, who has worked on Capitol Hill for 16 years and who is thinking of leaving her job as a staff member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She has her eye on a high-level position with the Peace Corps.

Goodman, the single mother of a 7-year-old, started looking around earlier this year after her boss, committee Chairman Dante Fascell (D-Fla.), announced that he would not seek reelection. Now, the process will be much easier with fellow Democrat Bill Clinton in the White House.

“It just opens up new vistas everywhere, not to mention there will be a lot more friendly people to talk to,” she says.

But despite the temptations, not all Democrats are willing or able to return to government service. Many of them--veterans of the Jimmy Carter years and the unsuccessful Michael S. Dukakis campaign--have been in political exile for a dozen years, never thinking this day would come. Now they are older, more settled and have more responsibilities.

“I thought I’d be coming into a meeting of former Carterites and we’d be banging into our wheelchairs and walkers before another Democrat got into the White House,” says Paul Costello, who served as assistant press secretary to former First Lady Rosalynn Carter and press secretary to Kitty Dukakis, wife of the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee.

Costello, 40, is now a senior vice president at Edelman Worldwide, an influential international public relations firm.

He did not work in the Clinton campaign and doesn’t think he is entitled to a political job in the Clinton Administration. Nevertheless, he admits that “to wake up to this, after 12 years, is an unbelievable experience, and how could you not feel tempted?”

The temptation may or may not be enough for medical ethicist Arthur Caplan, 42, who directs the ethics center at the University of Minnesota. Caplan unofficially has been talking with Clinton’s health-care transition team, holding general discussions about jobs. He is intrigued--and wary.

“Having watched what has happened under 12 years of Republicans in Washington, D.C., in terms of the neglect of the cities, you think long and hard about whether you want to move your family there,” he says. “Also, my wife has her own career.”

Caplan and his wife, an industrial psychologist at AT&T; Bell Labs, have an 8-year-old son. They have lived in Minnesota for five years; before that, they lived in Westchester County, outside New York City, where he worked at the Hastings Institute.

“There is something fun and engaging about getting to yap about what you might do--after all, it’s been a 12-year hibernation,” Caplan says. “But looking at the cost of living and the price of houses from the heartland, you’re faced with the staggering question of what sort of public (servant) do you really want to make? Because you are going to have to sacrifice.”

The outgoing Republicans should have such problems.

Koenig, for example, first volunteered for Reagan as a teen-ager. He used money earned from his newspaper delivery route to buy a train ticket to the 1976 GOP convention in Kansas City, where he worked for Reagan’s then-unsuccessful quest for the presidential nomination.

Some years later, however, at age 26, Koenig landed a job in the Reagan White House personnel office. His future wife also worked there, for First Lady Nancy Reagan. He stayed until the end of Reagan’s second term, then went to Connecticut for two years to work in the private sector.

But he returned to work for Bush, first at the Veterans Administration and then at the Pentagon, in the office of drug policy, where he is now. In January, he’ll be looking again.

“I guess I have a real Reaganesque type of optimism,” says Koenig, 33. “I’m confident I’ll find something that will enable me to provide for my wife and (14-month-old) daughter.”

Meanwhile, both Ingersoll--who has worked in the White House, the State and Commerce departments and USIA during his years here--and his 26-year-old wife, Honor, are concerned about their soon-to-be joblessness. Honor Ingersoll works in the office of Transportation Secretary Andrew Card as director of scheduling and advance.

But they say they are confident they will find something, and neither is locked into the idea of staying in Washington.

“I’m not going to waste my time competing with all my friends for the same government relations job,” Charlie Ingersoll says. “I may go look in Providence or Boston. A lot of people my age have bought houses and have children--thank God we’re much more flexible.”

In a way, “I’m relieved because it’s over. The last couple of weeks,” he says, “have been very stressful.”

Prestridge, 42, also held a political job in the Gerald R. Ford Administration, so she’s been through this before. But she is worried.

“Everybody is worried, particularly given the uncertainty of the future,” she says. “I’ve always landed on my feet, and I expect that I will again. There’s going to be a corporation, a company, a congressional committee or a news media organization who will need and want somebody who’s had the inside view of government that I’ve had.”

It helps to have suffered a previous election loss and know you can come back, she says. But you have to be prepared to lose.

“I didn’t approach this job with any expectations about job security,” Prestridge declares. “I’m like everybody who has been through the loss of an election. You understand these jobs can be short-lived, and only people who have been through this twice realize that these are not jobs for the faint-hearted.

“You know you have to take the risk of the outcome. And if you’re not willing to do that, then you don’t come back for a second round.”