All the Obama 20-Somethings

“This party,” Herbie Ziskend announced, “is in honor of John Quincy Adams.” The dirty-blond, blue-eyed 24-year-old, who once handled luggage for Barack Obama’s campaign and now works in the vice president’s office as a staff assistant, stood in the living room of a red-brick row house in Washington and flung his arms in the air as if to pay tribute to America’s sixth president. Then he paused, deflated: “But the police are here.”

Blue lights flashed through a window as Ziskend and a housemate, Jake Levine, went onto the porch to talk with the cops and promise to quiet things down. Levine, who is now 26, is a policy analyst in the energy-and-climate-change office of the White House. He and Ziskend, along with their other two housemates — Eric Lesser, 25, and Josh Lipsky, 24, who were then both White House staff assistants — were giving a party last July in their group house in Logan Circle, a neighborhood just east of Dupont Circle. People shifted nervously as they checked their BlackBerries and cellphones and talked about heading out. Ziskend reappeared. “Everybody, it’s O.K.,” he said, grinning. “Party is on.”

“Herbie, Herbie, Herbie,” came the chant. As a joke, someone called out “Eric Lesser,” and the cheer shifted: “Er-ic Les-ser! Er-ic Les-ser!” The revelers, a cross section of young, political Washington, were shouting for David Axelrod’s moon-faced, sweet-tempered special assistant, who also worked on the campaign as a baggage boy. Axelrod is Obama’s senior adviser and alter-ego, and Lesser is usually running his life, deciding how much brown sugar he can have in his oatmeal to keep his waistline in check or making sure he is on time for meetings with the president. He plays Felix to Axelrod’s messy, disorganized Oscar and is something of a sprightly West Wing mascot: neurotic and prepared but earnest and funny in a kid-brother way. In a muggy room to the right of the front door, Lesser danced to the Jay-Z remix of “Beware of the Boys,” by Panjabi MC, bounding up and down as a circle formed around him. Sweaty and beaming, he bounced with the energy that comes from being still fresh from college — not too many years after he was elected high-school class president with a “Lesser of Two Evils” campaign slogan.

Downstairs in the kitchen, a collection of young West Wing aides, former members of the advance staff on the campaign, newly minted press officers, White House softball regulars and the occasional journalist crowded in front of half a dozen bottles of cheap liquor, trying to get a drink. Obama’s chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, a sloe-eyed 28-year-old, was politely letting a stream of people cut in front of him to refill their beer, only to step up to find a dwindling trickle of foam. The keg was kicked.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02obamastaff-t.html?th&emc=th