Staffs awaiting orders to march

Jordan Salberg touched down in Las Vegas on Nov. 9 at 11:30 p.m.

The 24-year-old New York campaign organizer remembers the date -- and the time. He went straight to the Hillary Clinton campaign headquarters, where he was amazed that people were still working.

For the next two months, he worked a brutal schedule trying to get people to support the U.S. senator from New York. Mornings started at 8 a.m. Nights ended around midnight.

If there's one thing he has learned since arriving here, it's to "only worry about what you can control," he said.

And so he's not worried about his future.

On Monday, with Saturday's caucus over, Salberg sat in Clinton's office on east Tropicana Avenue, and he had not yet received word of where he's going next.

As quickly as campaign staffers from Clinton's and fellow presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaigns arrived Monday, they were getting ready to clear out.

One of Obama's campaign headquarters, on Flamingo Road near Pecos Road, looked like an abandoned fallout shelter. Or an average college dorm.

Papers, boxes, campaign fliers and signs were scattered throughout the offices. Furniture was not arranged in any particular order. Only a few staffers remained, typing on computers or sifting through stacks of papers for personal items.

"This is sort of the aftermath here," Nevada State Director David Cohen said as he walked past a stenciled drawing of Obama's face on the wall.

Cohen, who has lived in Nevada since 2005, had a Monday evening flight to Connecticut, where he will start campaigning.

Such is the life of the campaign staffer: live somewhere for a few months, work long hours, receive little pay, and move somewhere else when someone else tells you to, and repeat the process.

But most find it rewarding.

Marquita Sanders, 24, an Obama organizer, loaded up her car and left her home in Tallahassee, Fla., in late June. She arrived in Las Vegas on July 1 and moved in with a "support family," a family who volunteers to take in campaign supporters.

She had never been to Las Vegas or the desert.

What she found, she said, was incredible diversity: ethnic diversity, people from all parts of the country, people eager to participate in a caucus process unprecedented in Nevada.

"I've never seen anyplace like this," she said.

The people were enormously friendly, she said. Volunteers kept her well-fed. When her car broke down, they helped her get it fixed.

She will be loading her car today and making another cross-country trip, this time to Tennessee, where the Obama campaign has asked her to go.

Emmy Ruiz quit her job last year as a grant writer for the Red Cross to work for the Clinton campaign. She left her hometown of La Feria, Texas, about 180 miles south of San Antonio, and arrived in Las Vegas on June 18.

"I had no idea what to expect," the 24-year-old said as she loaded wads of paper from her desk into a trash bag.

Her parents helped her make the drive.

"They were a little hesitant -- their little girl is in Vegas," she said.

But like most campaign workers, Ruiz didn't get to experience much of the Las Vegas nightlife. She spent most of her time going door-to-door, in the inner city and suburbs .

"Every day I was here, I loved Vegas a little more," she said.

Depending on whom you ask, either Clinton won Saturday, by winning a majority vote and picking up momentum, or Obama won, by edging the New York senator by picking up one more delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

But all said the beyond-all-expectations total of roughly 117,000 Democratic voters was a success unto itself.

Since Saturday, the workers have had a brief reprieve from their 8 a.m. to midnight schedules. Several workers said they would like to come back to Nevada, to repeat the process in another four years.

But Salberg, the New Yorker who could be on the other side of the country by the end of this week, said he would come back just to visit.

"I have eight standing invitations for home-cooked meals, and I plan on fulfilling all of them."

Contact reporter Lawrence Mower at lmower@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0440.