Administration job rush at hand

Many hands out for Obama posts, former Clinton aide says

By Jane Fullerton

LITTLE ROCK — WASHINGTON - As President-elect Barack Obama fills the top posts in his administration, Bob Nash has a pretty good idea what a typical workday looks like for the folks in the personnel office screening thousands of applicants for less lustrous jobs.

"They are probably working 16 hours a day, seven days a week - just like we did," says Nash,the Texarkana native who spent six years overseeing the White House personnel office during Bill Clinton's administration.

Nash also has an inkling what life is like for Jim Messina, who is overseeing personnel for Obama's transition team.

"I couldn't go to a restaurant without having literally seven or eight people hand me a resume," Nash says of his days in presidential personnel.

Nash headed to Washington just days after Clinton's 1992 election, spending more than four months in the job.

"By Jan. 20, 1992, we had gotten about 130,000 resumes - and they were still coming," he recalls.

The flood is even greater for Obama's team: "My guess is that by Jan. 20, they'll have half a million applications."

After two years as the No. 3 man in the U.S. Agriculture Department, Nash returned to the White House as personnel director. He became the fifth person to hold the post in the first two years of Clinton's presidency. He stayed until Clinton left office in 2001.

What's the work like?

"It's like drinking water out of a fire hose when you're thirsty," Nash says.

How many jobs are there to be filled?

Less than 1 percent of federal positions, about 6,000, are political appointments, Nash says. But they're the juiciest plums - the Cabinet secretaries, the ambassadors, the folks who sit on boards and commissions overseeing everything from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to the Federal Elections Commission to the National Labor Relations Board.

"There is an expectation that if you worked hard for the president, that if you're highly educated, skilled and experienced, then there is a high likelihood you'll get a job," Nash says. "But the mathematics don't work that way."

"There are many more capable, competent people who supported Barack Obama's vision than there are available positions to serve."

During the eight years of the Clinton administration, the White House filled more than 12,000 jobs - but that included a lot of turnover. The average tenure for a political appointee was 30 months, Nash says.

Nash, who worked as a deputy campaign manager for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's unsuccessful presidential campaign, is now affiliated with James Lee Witt Associates, the emergencypreparedness firm run by theArkansan who headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Clinton administration.

The workload doesn't compare with what it's like in the White House.

"You are going to be working five days a week, 14 to 16 hours a day, probably 10 hours on Saturday and three or four hours on Sunday," Nash says.

Expect about the same to work in the office of a Cabinet secretary. But an agency job might demand only about 12 hours a day, with only occasional weekend assignments.

Nonetheless, the flood of resumes continues.

"It is a privilege and an honor to work for the president of the United States of America," Nash says. "I never dreamed growing up in the cotton fields of southern Arkansas that I would serve the president. The people who work for the president have to be able to view it as a mission; it's not a job for a paycheck."

Front Section, Pages 1, 10 on 12/20/2008