West Wingers Prepare to Campaign for Lower Office

WASHINGTON —  This is what it’s really like in the West Wing of the White House: Signs with a drawing of a dog’s head are dangling from several office doorknobs.

“I’m here until the last dog dies,” the signs lament.

The political purebreds who occupy those offices and similarly plush quarters around the capital are curled up and hoping someone will throw them a bone--in this case, jobs in or out of government.

The mood among 6,000 political appointees, the elite class that runs President Clinton’s administration, ranges from high anxiety to ennui to a sense of resignation. By Jan. 20, they all have to clear out, and that’s their reality after almost eight years of dominating a federal work force of 1.8 million people.

“Even though the roller coaster felt like it would never stop, it’s about to,” said a senior executive in one of the agencies. “Really, I never thought it would all end.”

Really, it is a peculiar transition that happens in no other place but Washington. One administration disappears, another follows. Some 6,000 Clintonistas, many transformed but burned out, are replaced with 6,000 newcomers, bright-eyed and ready to serve.

The 14 Cabinet secretaries, to their confidential assistants and clerks and thousands of other relatively important but not well-known wonks, all will have to start finding ways in the weeks after the election to move effortlessly (if traumatically) back into the private sector.

Last spring the local gossip columns were spilling over with announcements about departing big shots. But the movement slowed over the summer as influential trade groups and lobbying firms made it clear that they were waiting to see which party would dominate Congress and the White House before they filled high-level positions.

When Barry McCaffery, head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, sent an announcement in to the White House a couple of weeks ago saying he’d be leaving his job in January, more than a few people cracked, “Well, who isn’t?”

Though some Cabinet secretaries and their underlings are angling to stick around for a Gore administration, even if the vice president moves into the Oval Office, a good many of Clinton’s people will not be welcome or simply will leave. Many want to cash in on their high-octane resumes or want to reinvent themselves. Others just hope to find work.

“I’m worried about the flood of resumes,” Elizabeth Fine, a special assistant to the attorney general, said with a sigh. “All those lawyers looking for work. And me.”

“What you learn in Washington as a lawyer,” she explains, “is not necessarily usable anywhere else. You can take your wonderful title and try to market it, and anywhere else, they don’t give a hoot that you can get a senator on the phone or talk to someone high up in the Treasury Department.”

But Fine is one of many Clintonistas ready for a break. In the last eight years, first while she was working in the White House counsel’s office and later for Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, Fine had three children, juggled home life with her husband, former Clinton speech writer Michael Waldman, and turned 40.

“I guess it’s about time I grew up and got a real job,” she reports telling her husband on a regular basis. Their dinner conversations these days go something like this:

“Oh, my God,” he’ll say, “everybody we know is in the same boat, looking for work.”

“Oh, my God, how long does COBRA last?” she’ll say, referring to the the between-jobs health-coverage extension.

Indeed, even as they finish up reports about programs and policies long dreamed of and developed, these Democrats are pumping up their resumes, calling old friends and wondering about the rest of their professional lives. Several Cabinet secretaries have given deputies last-minute promotions so they have better titles and higher salaries to show off in the private sector.

“The reason I’m still here is because of my commitment to the president, but I’m simultaneously looking around,” said Bob Nash, director of presidential personnel. An Arkansan who worked for Clintonwhen he was governor and followed him to Washington, Nash isn’t sure he’ll head home in January.

“I could go home,” he said. “But I have enjoyed life here.”

This is also one of those revealing times that belies a well-known Washington myth promoted by the political class, whose members like to insist they’re from someplace else, as though service in a presidential administration or as a U.S. senator is a temporary assignment--a sort of extended business trip in Washington.

But when you actually find out how long it’s been since these political professionals have been “home,” it becomes clear that those who come for a while often stay.

In lobbying and law firms all over the city, there are former undersecretaries and senior advisors from administrations dating back to Nixon, Kennedy and Johnson. And what’s particularly odd is that these partisan players become oh-so bipartisan in the private sector. And so Jimmy Carter’s spokesman Jody Powell is in a firm with Nancy Reagan’s spokeswoman Sheila Tate. Same with Reagan’s Mike Deaver and Michael Dukakis’ Leslie Dach.

“If you stay more than six years, you’re not going to leave,” said Doug Sosnik, a former Clinton advisor who left the White House six months ago.

Sosnik likens working in the White House to “the best all-you-can-eat buffet life has to offer.” The excitement, the heady sense of power and the opportunity of public service make serving a president or a Cabinet secretary a difficult act to follow, he explains.

Sosnik spent so many years--three in all--looking for the right next job that he jokes, “My job search became something of a lifestyle.”

There were numerous offers. Several lobbying and public relations firms were eager to hire him for his access to the top Clinton aides or to cart him around to tell stories from behind the scenes in the Oval Office to clients.

“Those were the most easily transferable skills, and there is a real demand and real money for them,” he says.

Sosnik decided he couldn’t build his life solely around the size of his paycheck and began sorting out what was important to him. He decided to make a career--rather than just a job--change and went to work as a senior vice president of the National Basketball Assn.

But first Sosnik, who helped the president cope with the fallout from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, had a long sleep.

“I didn’t know how tired I was,” he said.

Sosnik and Don Baer, another former Clinton aide, say they’ve become a stop on the underground railroad for Clintonistas who are trying to spruce up for the business world, where managing a crisis or deciding who gets to sit where on Air Force One is less important than long-term strategic thinking.

Baer advises people to look for a landing pad, a good job that might lead to a better job, or to put together a package for six months, giving speeches and consulting, until they figure out exactly what it is they want to do.

“There’s a tendency to think that when I step out of this frenzy, this exciting job, I have to get the best job for the rest of my life,” said Baer, who now is a senior executive at the Discovery Channel. “That puts too much pressure on them.”

The president-elect has the option the day after the election to ask each and every presidential appointee for a resignation letter.

Even though it wouldn’t become effective until noon on Jan. 20, it could be the best 12-step program to reality.

The same senior executive who moaned about the end of the roller coaster ride said he looked forward to seeing his own name on a resignation letter.

“Maybe if I put it in writing, that I’m really leaving, I’ll actually start looking for a job,” he said. “Who me, in denial?”