Campaign jobs not as glamorous as hoped

Not many Princeton undergraduates think of answering phones and licking envelopes for a few hundred dollars a week as ideal post-graduation employment.

But for some seniors who plan to hit the campaign trail after graduation, their jobs will involve doing exactly that.

As members of the Class of 2007 begin searching for work on the 2008 campaign trail, many students are discovering that their tasks may be a far cry from the theoretical debates that initially drew them into politics.

"Many Princetonians are drawn to politics and politicians because of ideas," former College Republicans president Evan Baehr '05 said. He unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the Princeton Borough Council during his senior year at the University.

During his first year after graduation, Baehr worked for Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) on Capitol Hill. "When you find yourself in the political arena, you very quickly realize that while ideas are the inspiration, it is administration and logistics that are the foundation of campaigns and politics," he said.

Though a handful of seniors are planning to work on campaigns next year, they stressed that it is very early for them to know exactly what they will be doing — or even whether their candidates of choice will stay in the race past May.

Kris Ekdahl '07 is pursuing a job with the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Though he knows a job on the Obama campaign will involve long hours and low pay, Ekdahl is driven by his passion for Obama's platform. "As long as I believe in Obama's vision for America, and as long as I believe in the work I'm doing to help him promulgate that vision, I won't mind any of those things," he said in an email.

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Another former College Republicans president, Alexander Maugeri '07, hopes to work on Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential campaign after graduation. He is also a former associate editor of The Daily Princetonian.

Maugeri said the year after graduation is "the perfect time to get a job like [one on] a political campaign where the pay's not great, the hours are pretty long and there's a lot of traveling."

"It's really an opportunity to see the country," he said.

Tom Brown '07, who spent much of last semester helping to elect Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Pa.) but said he doesn't plan to campaign for a candidate full time after graduation, stressed how early in the political season it still is.

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"Don't forget we're in February 2007, and this thing isn't going to go down until November 2008," he said. "At this stage in the game you don't even know necessarily what you can do. Really all the campaigns are doing at this stage is fundraising. And that's really about it. They just need to get their money totals up to show that they're going to be viable."

Alumni currently working on campaigns said their day-today tasks are often less than glamorous.

Dylan Hogarty '06 is working on the Romney campaign. He said campaigns hire young people to do tasks that don't require much experience, like answering phones. "Another [part of the job] is coordinating travel arrangements for people or shepherding media members around."

Baehr said many graduates find themselves rudely awakened when they discover that jobs on the campaign trail involve these unglamorous tasks.

"When you get out there, you realize that the campaign is about persuading individual voters, one at a time, to vote for the candidate," he said. "And your success in that is primarily a function of name [recognition] and positive favorability, and really has little to do with the actual policy ideas that you are selling."

But Maugeri stressed that getting to know candidates up close while campaigning can dispel ideas people sometimes form about politicians. "Watching politics, you can become really cynical," he said. "But when you actually see the candidate, by and large they really are decent people trying to do the right thing and fighting for the causes they believe in, and you see that more when the cameras aren't on and the reporters aren't in the room."

Hogarty said the campaigning itself can also be enjoyable. "Working on a campaign is a tremendously fun experience," he said. "You're around a lot of very young people. You're working very hard. You believe in something very strongly; that's why you're doing it, and you're around people who believe the same things. You tend to get along with those people and form a pretty close-knit group."

There can also be a more practical side to campaign work, especially for graduates hoping to garner full-time jobs with political offices once their candidates are elected. "The loyalty of administrations in their hiring cannot really be underestimated," Baehr said. "If the next president serves for eight years, it is really important to have logged some hours on the campaign at some stage."