After nearly six months on the road, sleeping in hotels, herding an unruly press corps onto buses, and boarding and emptying out charter planes from Medford, Ore., to Mecklenburg County, N.C., Jen Psaki on Friday faced reality.
With seemingly no end to the Democratic campaign in sight, Sen. Barack Obama's traveling press aide went to the Chicago apartment she has seen a dozen times since December, put her belongings into storage and let her lease lapse. She is now officially homeless.
"This race gives new meaning to that phrase 'marathon, not a sprint,' but these last few months have been more like sprinting through a marathon," said Psaki, who saw no reason to keep paying rent after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's win in Pennsylvania. "Nobody expected it to go this long."
If the American people are growing weary of the protracted Democratic nomination fight, they've got nothing on the candidates, their staffs or their staffs' families. A campaign that has stretched more than a year has now reached virtually every state, has seen babies born and staffers married, and has now begun to heat up again.
Fabiola Rodriguez-Ciampoli, Clinton's director of Hispanic communications, arrived in San Antonio on Feb. 15 to ramp up outreach to Latinos in Texas. Two days later, her long-awaited adoption papers came through and she became a mother, working out of an adviser's home with an infant in her lap.
Between the two, the campaigns have logged more than 2,000 meal stops, from Yum Yum Donuts in Baldwin Park, Calif., to the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach -- with pit stops at 15 7-Elevens from North Las Vegas to Raymond, N.H.
The Clinton campaign has sent out 1,572 news releases since the beginning of the campaign in 2007, the Obama campaign 454.
Exhausted
"Sometimes, yes, of course," Obama acknowledged Tuesday, when asked whether he was exhausted.
It's starting to show. "Why can't I just eat my waffle?" Obama snapped at a reporter who sought to interrupt his breakfast with a policy question last week in Pennsylvania. Pressed during the Philadelphia debate on her claim to have faced sniper fire in Bosnia, Clinton shrugged off a question from voter Tom Rooney. "I will either try to get more sleep, Tom, or, you know, have somebody that, you know, is there, as a reminder to me," she said.
Clinton and Obama aides insist that the candidates are holding up remarkably well. Clinton gulps down hot peppers to keep illness at bay. Obama took a day off last week to see his daughters off to school.
But there is no way to completely hide how punishing the campaign has been. Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain has pared back his schedule, taken the time to grill ribs for reporters at his Sedona, Ariz., ranch and carefully picked the venues for his public appearances. His would-be Democratic opponents have no such luxuries.
"Not surprisingly, I think, you have the tiredness setting in, with people doing the exact same assignment they've been doing for a year, day in and day out," said an Obama campaign adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, since other campaign aides would attest only to how spry they are all feeling these days.
The campaign has been punishing. On March 3, Clinton left her hotel at 5 a.m. to greet workers changing shifts at a Jeep plant in Toledo. From 7:30 to 8:40, she conducted interviews with Ohio and Texas media before she traveled to the University of Toledo. After her rally, she jetted off to Beaumont, Tex., for a 1:30 rally, then flew to Austin to tape a segment for "The Daily Show" at 5:15, then held a town hall meeting at 6:30, then a rally at 8:15, before flying to Houston, where she reached her hotel just after midnight.
On March 21, Obama reached his Portland, Ore., hotel around midnight, after a cross-country flight from West Virginia. A few hours later, he was up greeting New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who would endorse him at a morning rally in Portland. After a morning news conference, a town hall meeting in Salem and a boisterous stop in Corvallis, Obama rolled into Eugene for a 9 p.m. rally at the University of Oregon. Not done yet, he boarded his plane and landed in Medford well past 1 a.m.
For the Clinton camp, the fatigue is compounded by the drumbeat of pundits and opponents declaring her campaign dead or calling on her to drop out. Sean Johnson -- a political aide with a wife, a 6-year-old daughter, Sydney, and a 5-year-old son, Carter, in White Plains, Md. -- joined up in early 2007 and began his life as a road warrior three months ago. The buildup to the Maryland primary was considerable, and Johnson was working on the home front. His wife, Rhya Marohn, a house-calling veterinarian, was running as a Clinton delegate.
Then Clinton got trounced in the Potomac Primary. When Sydney asked her father how his boss had done, he had to be honest.
"Well," the girl chirped, "we just have to go win Texas," and three days later, Johnson was off to the Lone Star State.
Usually, long before spring, primary campaign staffs are rejuvenated with new blood from other campaigns that have gone under. Jobs and roles change to keep people from languishing. The Clinton team has gotten some fresh legs. Under duress, the candidate brought in a new campaign manager, Maggie Williams, in February, then a new pollster, Geoff Garin, who became a strategist this month.
But the tight-knit Obama camp has remained small, stable and overworked. Last year, Democratic campaign veteran Steve Hildebrand turned down a top job with the campaign, not wanting to leave his home and business in South Dakota. He finally joined, with the understanding that he would handle the first four states and that was all.
Instead, he has become the deputy campaign manager. Those four states turned to 44, and he is now in the Chicago headquarters he had hoped to avoid.
Obama jokes to crowds that in the 15 months since he launched his campaign, "babies have been born and are now walking and talking."
Grind is no joke
But for the candidate and his staff, the grind has been no joke. Most Obama staffers signed up at the beginning of the race, with no expectation that when May rolled around, the battle would still be raging. But they are still sitting in hotel lobbies at 1 a.m., typing up the next day's schedule or working out logistical glitches.
Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director, sees his young son so rarely that he brought the boy to Dulles International Airport one recent morning so they could spend time together before the plane took off. Campaign manager David Plouffe moved his family to Chicago, but although he lives a short walk from downtown headquarters, he is hardly ever home. Last weekend, Jewish staffers borrowed a conference room at the Harrisburg, Pa., Sheraton to hold a Passover seder.
Adding to the strain is the race's shifting momentum, along with the false hope raised at several intervals that an end would be just around the corner. Obama's losses in Texas and Ohio dealt a serious psychological blow to his staff. They had counted on a better outcome -- if not nudging Clinton out of the race, then at least easing the pressure until the Pennsylvania primary six weeks later. Many had already made vacation plans. But their traditional sojourns to spring training became a three-day Easter weekend, overlapping with Obama's family trip to the Virgin Islands.
The candidate tries to swing through Chicago about once a week, sometimes for just a few hours. The night of the Pennsylvania primary, Obama flew from Philadelphia to Evansville, Ind., held a 10 p.m. rally, then headed back to the airport to fly to Chicago. He got home after 1 a.m. and was back at Midway Airport by 8 a.m. to return to southern Indiana for another event. Obama was notably flat at the New Albany town hall, but he did get to have breakfast with his daughters.
Bill Burton, Obama's press secretary, was one of the first four people to sign up with the campaign. On July 7, he took time off to get married. Since taking his vows, he has gotten Christmas and Thanksgiving off and one three-day weekend with his wife and their dog in St. Michaels, on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
"I think my wife has been a real hero on this campaign," he said. "When you sign up to marry a guy, you don't expect that you're not going to see him for more than a year."