Michael Feldman knew he'd be making some sacrifices when he decided to spend a year on the road with Al Gore's presidential campaign. But Feldman, a senior adviser to the vice president, couldn't have anticipated what would happen to him one night earlier this year.
Feldman, assigned to share a hotel room with Gore's press secretary, Chris Lehane, was trying to get some sleep. But Lehane was snoring loudly and incessantly. Finally, Feldman could stand it no more. He stood over the spokesman and shouted, "Lehane, you're snoring!"
Lehane stirred long enough to shout back three words: "Feldman, you're flatulent!" With that, the press secretary to the vice president of the United States resumed his snoring.
The Gore campaign, it seems, is full of strange bedfellows. Last fall, when the campaign was hemorrhaging cash, campaign manager Donna Brazile set out to cut costs. Gore lost some use of his helicopter, and consultant Bob Shrum was reduced to flying Southwest Airlines. But the most disruptive requirement was the one forcing traveling staffers to share hotel rooms.
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The belt-tightening worked: Gore finished the primaries with more money than George W. Bush's campaign (which doesn't require senior staff to share rooms). But the room-sharing policy also changed the lives of Gore's aides in unpredictable ways. Sleeping together for most of the past 10 months, the Gore staffers have learned more than they ever wanted to know about one another. "My life is an open book more than I ever imagined," says Gore speechwriter Eli Attie. "An open book and an open bed."
Nathan Naylor knows all about that. The Gore advance man has a reputation for such ferocious snoring that when David Morehouse, Gore's trip director, found that he would be bunking with Naylor, he plunked down his personal credit card to get his own room. Even the formidable snorer Lehane paid for a room to avoid Naylor. "Windows crack, plaster falls," Lehane says of one "sleepless night" in Naylor's presence. ("My wife still loves me," Naylor replies.)
Making things messier, staffers have access to one another's rooms (the Secret Service secures the entire floor, so room doors are often open). Consider the case of Matthew Bennett, at one time Gore's trip director. His colleagues sneaked into his room and called the hotel operator claiming to be him. "I need a wake-up call every hour during the night," the Bennett impersonator said. "I'll yell and scream, but pay no attention. I have a sleeping disorder, and that's the only way I can get up in the morning." They also set his alarm for the middle of the night and removed all the light bulbs in the room. (Bennett, coincidentally, has since found other work.)
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Some Gore staffers wonder if the room-sharing savings justify the sleep deprivation. One night Attie and Austin Brown, who works for a Gore consultant, were sharing a room, one in a bed and one on a pullout couch. Over the two hours after they turned out the lights, three more Gore-affiliated strangers came in, one taking a spare bed, one toting a mattress and the other one curling up on the floor. As the five men drifted off to sleep, one of the unknown staffers "started snoring like a maniac," Brown reports. Attie finally threw a pillow at the offender, to no effect.
Share this articleShareThe proximity makes the Gore aides unusually familiar. They know that Gore's opposition researcher, David Ginsberg, keeps spoiled food in his hotel rooms. They know that Brazile likes to sleep with the TV on. They have witnessed Lehane doing affirmations in the mirror, repeating the mantra "top 1 1/2 percent" (of what, he doesn't say). Gore himself sometimes prowls the staff hallway at night, waking aides who answer the door in boxer shorts. Along the way, the antics have boosted camaraderie and lightened tension. "There's a lot of inner bonding that happens," says Sarah Bianchi, a Gore policy adviser.
Then there's the delicate matter of bathroom time. Brazile complains of a woman who spends way too much time in the bathroom getting ready. She won't name names, but three Brazile roommates--Bianchi, former communications director Laura Quinn and policy chief Elaine Kamarck--deny being the one. ("I'm one of the fastest dressers you'll ever find among the female type," says Kamarck.) That leaves Gore scheduler Lisa Berg, who declines to discuss her nocturnal habits.
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The campaign keeps hotel rooms single sex, to maintain propriety. But it's not unusual for a top Gore aide to be assigned to share a room with a total stranger. One night, Attie arrived at a room occupied by another Gore worker who had been there for two nights. "It looked like a college dorm room: this horrible stench of unwashed laundry, stuff on the floor and toothpaste all over the sink," Attie says. "This guy needed shock therapy, if not better breeding."
Even among friends, the rooming situation can raise tensions. Morehouse, for example, won't share a room with Lehane because of a particularly bad night. "I refuse to spend another night with that miserable little man," Morehouse says with a laugh. "He sleeps annoyed. He grimaces. He yells at you in his sleep. He shouts vulgarities if you open the window." Lehane, however, offers another version: "I thought I was spending the night with a carnival worker. He stands over my bed at 3 a.m. like the Karate Kid. He says he's stretching his hamstring." (Morehouse says he had a cramp.)
Lehane has found a somewhat more compatible partner in Feldman, who suffers his abuse more calmly. Feldman doesn't mind the booby traps his roommate sets for him, such as turning the shower head so it sprays Feldman in the face when he turns the water on. Each night Feldman kicks open the bathroom door to see if a wet towel falls on him. He pulls off the sheets of his bed to inspect for objects. He checks to see if there is any silverware in his pillowcase. "One night in the dark I encountered a banana," he says. Feldman once retaliated by inviting a Japanese TV crew to film Lehane sleeping early in the morning. But Lehane invited the same crew back into the room as Feldman emerged from the shower.
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The two roommates spend most nights listening to each other's cell phones ring and pagers buzz. Once, in Los Angeles, tensions boiled over and Morehouse was forced to mediate a screaming match between the two outside the door to their room. "I've always assumed the campaign was performing an experiment on me about the ability to withstand prolonged exposure to Lehane," Feldman says. Even after one night, their room is in chaos; other Gore aides must step over socks and underwear to enter the room.
Brazile, responding to Feldman's pleas, has finally agreed to loosen the roommate requirement. She has agreed to give them separate rooms after next month's Democratic National Convention. But Feldman would be premature to believe his roommate troubles are over. Says Lehane, "He'll only be a doorway away."
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