‘War Rooms’ Are Center of Stormy Season

Out along Mainstream Drive, a couple of turns from the huge inflated tent that the Tennessee Titans use for rainy day football practice, another sort of team toils in a different sort of bubble.

Sealed inside an innocuous office building, Al Gore’s campaign staff is awhirl. Kenneth Baer hammers out another speech. Mike Smith marshals the battle for the Midwest. Kym Spell offers reporters snappy telephone retorts.

Two states away, deep in downtown Austin, Texas, the buttoned-down campaign headquarters of George W. Bush buzzes in the belly of a marble high-rise a few blocks from the statehouse’s pink-granite dome.

Brent Greenfield scans a dozen TVs in the “war room.” Ken Mehlman plots direct-mail, final-minute phoning. And off in a cubicle, foreign policy advisor Joel Shin--computer keyboard on his lap--succumbs to his routine of 22-hour workdays. His eyes close, his head rolls back, the snoring begins.

Zzzzzzznnnn-gug-gug-gug . . .

Hello from the home office.

In this stormy political season, Austin and Nashville are the vortexes of twin typhoons that have swirled for months across the land. Now, as America prepares to select a president, the gale has only intensified.

The cadre of disarmingly youthful Republicans and Democrats that forms the nucleus of the dueling camps runs these days on caffeine and adrenaline.

Dinner is all too often Pizza Hut or Taco Bell or the office vending machine. Haircuts are put off. Once-a-week golf or tennis habits abandoned.

Bush staffer Dan Bartlett keeps a pitching wedge in his office, a totem to the life he left behind: “I pick it up, hold it and wish.”

A pleasant diversion is a football tossed around to break the tension. Or a litter of abandoned puppies that was cuddled and adopted out at Gore HQ one recent day. Or perhaps a quick jaunt outside for a smoke and the discovery that, yes, there still is a sky out there.

If These Walls Could Talk

The office space they occupy is as different as the candidates.

Bush’s headquarters is upscale, snug among the corporate suites in a glistening skyscraper. The reception area is dark wood panels, glass-topped tables and gold lamps. Behind locked doors, the office snakes for 42,000 square feet around two floors of cubicles. Campaign placards cover the walls, trail souvenirs ring desks.

Gore’s place, by contrast, is like some county Democratic headquarters all grown up. Sprawling over an acre of single-story floor space, it is dominated by a huge, open room housing the bulk of the 250-person staff. Desks are crammed together in pods. Privacy is nonexistent. “The pit,” they call it.

Walled off on one edge is “the cage,” where the Democratic presidential candidate’s research and policy wonks reside. Along another wall is the campaign’s war room, dubbed “the kitchen.” It was a lunchroom in a previous lifetime.

Sealed inside their rival HQs, the troops’ rhythm is dictated by the pulse of the campaign. They deal with logistical hiccups at candidate stops in distant states, shape strategy and answer up to 800 media calls a day.

These are victims of the 24-hour news cycle.

In Nashville, Stu Loeser keeps a sleeping bag and foam pad beside his desk so his eight-person staff can catch a nap between shifts monitoring a bank of TV screens around the clock.

“I’m often up 30 hours straight. During the convention, it was 38 hours straight,” says Loeser, a tassel-haired New York state native who has become a sort of cult hero to his peers.

Loeser produces the daily 100-page synopses of campaign news, along with a droll comic take on the media during morning meetings. The running joke is that Loeser’s stand-up is the only reason Tad Devine, a top Gore strategist, bothers to show up at the 8:15 a.m. session.

At the Bush HQ, staffers say the pace never seems to let up.

“I’ve poured concrete on high-rises, done construction,” said Robert Woodson, who puts in 16-hour days to help shape the GOP candidate’s policy message. “But this is by far the hardest work I’ve ever done.”

The place pulsed Thursday when news broke of Bush’s 1976 drunken-driving arrest. But the campaign team, insiders say, took the stoic path. Strategists met. The message was shaped. Surrogates were primed to mount a defense. Out on the road, the Texas governor held his press conference.

Then the headquarters staff scrambled onward into the campaign’s final 100 hours.

So Different, Yet So Alike

Ideological differences aside, the rival camps share some startling similarities.

Both are young. Nearly all but the top advisors are working on their first presidential campaign. The median age for Bush’s campaign staff is 30. For the Gore team it is 28. Tricia Enright, a 33-year-old deputy communications director for Gore, admits feeling like “a den mother.”

With that youth comes a certain shared zeal, a manic intensity and devotion to the candidates rarely found in more seasoned politicos.

Many have left good jobs in Washington, particularly in the Gore camp. Most have taken salary cuts to come on. But the payoff is big: Staffers on a victorious campaign routinely find a place in the administration, maybe even the White House.

“This is our Olympics,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a Gore communications staffer. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play at this level of the game.”

Mornings, Pfeiffer doesn’t have to worry about an alarm clock. He wakes to the shrill ring of his cell phone. Some reporter is always on the other end.

Pfeiffer concluded that his life was utterly lashed to the campaign when he learned the baseball playoffs had started and he didn’t even know it.

“Our world is this,” he said, hands sweeping the air. “Most of us have not seen a movie in a really long time.”

They have left behind their real lives--wives and kids, pets and plants and boyfriends--to perform sometimes menial jobs for which they’re insanely overqualified.

Bush has three Rhodes scholars and a trio of erstwhile U.S. Supreme Court clerks on staff. John Ackerly, 26, did a stint at Oxford and is an accomplished oil painter. The sleep-deprived Joel Shin has several Harvard degrees.

It’s similar at the Gore camp. Baer got a doctorate at Oxford, became one of Gore’s speech writers and wrote a book, “Reinventing Democrats.” All by age 28.

Now he pounds out drafts for stump speeches. His working copy gets massaged as it rises through the ranks of advisors, finally reaching the ultimate editor, Al Gore himself. Victory is seeing a joke or an idea bubble into the public realm.

Smith, 29, left his job as a lawyer to be Gore’s Midwest political director. Instead of filing torts, he now targets the voting blocs of each state, plots where in the region Gore might best go next.

“I’m the guy,” Smith says, “who remembers that on July 3 we were in Saint Louis County to talk about prescription drugs.”

Yet it took him two months to learn the phone number at his Nashville apartment--and he needn’t have bothered. Smith, always at the office, has never gotten a call there.

For fun, the young die hards hit Nashville’s local watering holes. One after-hours regular said her favorite drink, a Gray Goose Martini up and dirty with olives, awaits when she arrives.

Entertainment the Troops

With the polls whipsawing and nerves shaking, the Democrats hold nightly skits to fan esprit de corps.

It started with campaign strategist Devine, a wry sort, doing his impersonation of Elvis.

Now self-deprecation is the rule. On Halloween night, a staffer in a Gore mask traded barbs with a collection of costumed characters. The skit wound up with a reworking of the ‘60s hit “Proud Mary.”

Swing vote keeps us thinking . . .

Gender gap keeps on shrinking . . .

Roll-out, roll-out

Not another roll-out.

Ron Klain, Gore’s former chief of staff, managed a laugh despite himself. For months he’s been a dad at a distance. Now he was missing Halloween with his three kids.

“I’m miserable,” Klain admitted. “Absolutely miserable.”

The Bush team feels their pain.

Tucker Eskew’s wife back in South Carolina had a baby a month after he came on. Rob Woodson just missed his second Halloween with the kids, ages 3 and 7.

Sarah Youssef, 25, compares the campaign to a marathon she ran, “but instead of four hours it’s been a year and a half.”

Since moving over from the Heritage Foundation to handle education policy for Bush, Youssef’s social life has evaporated. An old D.C. relationship ebbed. She dated a guy from Austin, but that went nowhere.

“No one else,” she shrugged, “works these hours.”

Under her desk is an aging box of Grape Nuts flakes, some canned soup, peanut butter. Early in the campaign, she and others found time to hit the Salt Lick, an Austin institution for good barbecue. Some weekends, folks drop in on Austin’s fleet of rollicking bars.

Not anymore. Not with just days left.

“Right now,” says her colleague Ackerly, “if we hit Happy Hour that would be Al Gore’s happiest hour.”