Obama meets with advisorsLife at the White House is work, work, work.
The White House mess -- the military-inspired term for the West Wing cafeteria -- opens at 7 a.m. each day. And each day, there is a long line of hungry staffers who have already been at the office for well over an hour.
By 8 p.m., as the doors to the mess are about to close, the orders flow again as bleary-eyed staffers grab dinner before heading back to their offices for another conference call or meeting.
"I think the mess hates all of us," said a frequent customer who is a senior adviser to President Obama.
In a city where work can border on obsession, the Obama staffers stand out. They are not quite the walking dead, but their eyes are frequently ringed with the bags that accompany exhaustion.
"This is a place, because of the stress, the schedule and the sheer hours, that just chews people up and spits them out," said press secretary Robert Gibbs, whose alarm clock is set to 4:30 a.m., though he ignores the early ring more often these days.
All West Wings face fatigue at some point, but the Obama team has had a particularly frenetic start, the result of inheriting the worse economic crisis since the Great Depression and the team's own seemingly chaotic drive to push an agenda that includes the creation of a new health insurance system, auto bailouts, Middle East peace, nuclear nonproliferation, two wars and education reform. Read more at WaPo
