Out-of-Town Tryouts for the West Wing

ES MOINES

THE 25 or so cars in the overflowing parking lot on a recent night at Wellman's Pub here had license plates representing a dozen states and bumper stickers from three current presidential campaigns, not to mention decals from six colleges and universities.

Inside, dozens of young workers from Senator John Edwards's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination gathered at the dark wooden bar. Campaign workers for Representative Richard A. Gephardt sat at tables near the dartboards and jukebox, and campaigners for Senator John Kerry claimed the back corner. Interspersed were a few isolated workers for Dr. Howard Dean.

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Jamiyl Peters, 23, who had driven to Des Moines from Washington two days earlier, made his way through the smoky, crowded room. At the bar, he ran into a classmate from Williams College he hadn't seen in over a year. "What are you doing here?" Mr. Peters asked. The friend, Jonathan Pahl, it turned out, was working for Senator Edwards in Sioux City, Iowa. "It's good to know there is still a familiar face so far away from home," said Mr. Peters, who until recently had worked on the Kerry campaign in Washington.

All week, the young foot soldiers of the candidates work 14-hour days, and they tend to gather in separate bars and restaurants to hash over daily events. But on weekends these aspiring James Carvilles and Mary Matalins, just a few years removed from student council days, check their rivalries at the door of Wellman's, Des Moines's version of neutral Switzerland, to mingle over bottles of Leinenkugel's beer at $1.25 and leave 50-cent tips.

"We're all friends, despite what your boss might have done on Medicare," said Bill Burton, 26, the press spokesman for Representative Gephardt.

Even though two Democratic aspirants, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman and Gen. Wesley K. Clark, are not campaigning in Iowa, five Democratic campaigns are active here — more than in any election season since 1988, when seven Democrats and six Republicans jostled to succeed Ronald Reagan. (President Bush is unopposed for 2004, so there has been little Republican influx for the Iowa caucuses, on Jan. 19.) With a political system favoring grass-roots organizing over television air wars, Iowa has become the hottest place to be for ambitious Democratic campaign workers hoping for a role in the next "War Room."

"Iowa tells the rest of the nation who could and who should be president," said Jeffery Winmill, 25, a field organizer for the Kerry campaign from Pocatello, Idaho, who said he has always wanted a future in politics.

So fresh college graduates show up as volunteers, hoping eventually to be hired for as little as $1,000 a month. National campaign staff workers wanting the adrenaline rush and the cachet of hand-to-hand politics request transfers to Des Moines. "Iowa is a state that launches people's careers," said Brad Anderson, 28, a researcher for the Edwards campaign. "Politically, this is where the action is. D.C. is on the sidelines right now."

With 64 days left until the caucuses, where the first delegates will be picked for the national presidential conventions, about 250 campaign workers have already decided that the long hours, the low pay and the inherent job instability are worth whatever payoff may be at the end — be it a job in a new presidential administration or enough field experience to run a Congressional campaign. Some arrived as early as February; others have just shown up.

Together, they form a subculture — transient, zealous and competitive, though bonded by common denominators like nights on leaking air mattresses, meals of cold pizza and long hours selling their candidates' visions door to door. Many even live in the same building in Des Moines, at 3000 Grand Avenue (usually called just "3000 Grand"), a modern building with a gym and three-bedroom apartments that go for $1,000 a month. Needless to say, the Iowa troops are overwhelmingly young.

"It's almost as if you see a young person in Des Moines, it's a 50 percent chance that they work on a campaign," said Jack Ryan, a 24-year-old Kerry campaign worker from Massachusetts. Indeed, an informal poll of all five Democratic campaigns suggested that some 90 percent of the 250 or so full-time workers now in Iowa are in their 20's — a good number of them under 25. Over all in Iowa, 13 percent of the population is in its 20's.

As reality television has made clear, tossing attractive young single people into a stressful, intense environment inevitably results in romantic encounters, and inter- and intracampaign romances are part of life in Des Moines. Mr. Burton, the spokesman for Representative Gephardt, is dating the Kerry spokeswoman, Laura Capps. They met in July in Urbandale, Iowa, where their respective candidates were addressing a gathering of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

"There is a lot of cross-pollination," said Jean Hessburg, 40, the executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party.

Allison Stuntz, 23, first visited Iowa after receiving an e-mail message at home in Austin, Tex., from the Dean campaign offering volunteers a free trip to Des Moines to knock on doors for a weekend. When she showed up at the Des Moines headquarters, she was surprised that the campaign resembled more a student government election than a presidential one.

"It was inspiring to see that it was people my age who were running the show," said Ms. Stuntz, who had been working as a waitress and a freelance writer. After one weekend campaigning, she applied for a job. Now she is staying in Des Moines at the home of a Dean supporter. (This is not unusual: many workers who are watching their budgets stay with local supporters of their candidates.)

For some young campaigners, working in Iowa is part of a larger career plan that started in high school. In 1984, Martin O'Malley, now mayor of Baltimore, toured Iowa as a campaign worker for Senator Gary Hart, playing guitar for audiences across the state. Other campaigners, stirred by their own opposition to the war in Iraq, have traveled to Iowa to support particular candidates.

Three campaign workers — Chris Hayler, 25, Jennifer Psaki, 24, and John Liipfert, 26, who now room together — worked last year on the re-election campaigns of Senator Tom Harkin and Gov. Thomas J. Vilsack, both of Iowa. They wanted to position themselves for the state's presidential caucuses. All see their futures in politics. This year they evaluated the presidential contenders before choosing to work for Mr. Kerry.

"It was like being in a mall, shopping for candidates," said Mr. Liipfert, who is from Maryland. Ms. Psaki, who is from Connecticut, saw Mr. Kerry a year ago at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner, an annual Democratic event in states across the country. "When I heard him speak, I thought, `This is the guy.' " she said.

Now they share an apartment at 3000 Grand decorated with little except three huge campaign signs, one each for Mr. Kerry, Mr. Harkin and Mr. Vilsack, but no couch. (Why bother? "We're all working 90 hours a week," said Mr. Hayler.)

Their place is becoming known as a crash pad. Ten people slept there last weekend, including Mr. Peters, recently in from Washington.

With staff members working and living in such close proximity, rival campaigns can observe comings and goings and read much into nuances of behavior. The Dean, Edwards and Kerry campaign headquarters, along with the former campaign headquarters of Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who dropped out of the campaign last month, are all within three blocks in a fading area of downtown Des Moines.

In the compressed world of Iowa presidential politics, word travels fast. Workers at rival campaigns, for example, knew the weekend before Mr. Graham quit the race that something was afoot, when his workers showed up at Lucky's bar on a Friday at 11:30 in the morning.

"The bar is right next to the Edwards campaign headquarters, and word got around," said Sarah Leonard, the spokeswoman for the Dean campaign and one of the few native Iowans working on the caucuses. After Mr. Graham's withdrawal, the Dean campaign sent three cases of beer over. The Graham workers partied for the next three days in Mr. Graham's Des Moines apartment at 3000 Grand — or so say Kerry workers who lived one floor above.

"It really is like a sitcom," Ms. Leonard said.

But inevitably, the competitive nature of the races has seeped into the social dynamic. Dean staff members say that as their candidate's prominence has grown, they have withdrawn socially because they feel under attack.

Other campaigns have noted that the Dean campaign has not been well represented at Wellman's lately. Instead, last Saturday, Ms. Stuntz and Ms. Leonard joined dozens of other Dean workers at Billy Joe's Pitcher Show, a karaoke bar, for a 25th-birthday party for a co-worker, Maureen Meyers. Well into the party, they went onstage and belted out "I've Got Friends in Low Places."

"Our staff has been encouraged to watch what they say around the staff of other campaigns," Ms. Leonard said. She said, for example, that the Gephardt campaign organized a protest at a speech by Dr. Dean after being tipped to his schedule by the Kerry campaign. "They'll use anything — what one staff person says to another staff person," she said.

That caution may not be misplaced. Last year in the race for the Senate, an offhand comment by a staff worker for one campaign to a worker for another generated an advertisement in which Mr. Harkin, the incumbent, pointed out that his Republican rival, Greg Ganske, wasn't offering health benefits to his campaign staff.

Last spring, when most campaigners were still arriving, things were not so tense. The Gephardt campaign organized a bowling contest at Val Lanes in West Des Moines in June for all the campaign staffs. As a prize, the victorious team subjected the others to an impromptu song about its candidate.

The victor, with an average score of 141, was the campaign staff of Representative Kucinich. "We equated it to the campaign," said Jessica Ireland, 22, a Kucinich scheduler. "We're quiet, no one notices us come in and bam! We win."

Asked what will happen to them after caucus day, Jan. 19, most staff members shrug. Some will be dispatched to the primary states of New Hampshire, South Carolina and New Mexico to help with the next round. Others, if their candidates fare poorly, may find themselves jobless.

Or maybe they'll just sign on with another candidate.

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