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.  Back by the front door, Ziskend’s eyes widened. “Look who just walked in!” he said. “The counsel.” It was the principal deputy White House counsel, Daniel Meltzer, who is 58, in a pale green T-shirt and slacks. “Looks like you’re O.K. here,” he said to Lesser, surveying the sweaty scene.  “You have to do a keg stand,” Lesser said.  Alejandra Campoverdi, the 30-year-old special assistant to the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, had just come with Meltzer from a different party, where Gregory Craig, then the 64-year-old White House counsel, was another unlikely “adult” guest. At the earlier get-together, Meltzer and Norman Eisen, the 49-year-old White House ethics adviser, offered a ride home to some of the young staff members, who instead urged them to come along to the next house. So Meltzer had given Campoverdi and a few other West Wing staff members a ride over to this party in his minivan. “Dan Meltzer’s minivan,” she laughed, curled up on the stairs.  President Obama’s young staff and their senior counterparts mix seamlessly and often sweetly. During the primaries, Axelrod once dropped by a party at the Pad — a group house in Chicago where seven campaign staff members lived, worked and played the video game Rock Band. The rumpled, over-50 “Axe,” as nearly everyone calls him, impressed the crowd by playing a game of beer pong. Now in Washington, he still makes the rare appearance at parties for junior staff members. When friends of the 31-year-old deputy communications director, Jen Psaki, gave her an afternoon engagement party at the Cork wine bar near Logan Circle, Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and Axelrod came by, arriving with Lesser.  When Barack Obama’s presidential campaign began on a clear and frigid day in Springfield, Ill., in 2007, the young men and women who would shovel snow in Iowa, crash on couches in Pittsburgh and pass up grad school to join it could not quite grasp that two years later their journey would end at the Oval Office. They also could not imagine all of the unseen difficulties that would await them — everything from a cratering economy and an attempt at a Christmas Day terrorist attack to plummeting poll numbers as their president fell to earth. Showing up to work each day at the most prestigious address in America can feel a bit like finals week in college. They are always on call, always working hard. To these mostly 20-something staff members, Obama is a strict father, one with high expectations, whom they don’t want to disappoint. Michelle Obama is more of a big sister, tapping her toes about when that boyfriend is ever going to propose or playing Cupid by suggesting a match. She gives young, single White House staff members the kind of dating tips she offered in Glamour magazine’s December issue, warning young women: “Cute’s good. But cute only lasts for so long.”  “What do you say to the first lady?” one male staff member, dubious of the first lady’s efforts to set him up, moaned to me during dinner at the J&G Steakhouse in the W Hotel last summer. “ ‘I didn’t like her? She wore a push-up bra?’ ”  As the months have gone by, the young staff members in Obama’s White House have grown more comfortable and confident, reshaping the city around them in their image — idealistic, earnest, geeky, understated, wise-cracking. They are walking and talking in the halls of the federal government, helping to shape the country in real ways, just as harried young aides did on “The West Wing” TV show they watched growing up. They may yet grow arrogant, but for now they have settled into the more quotidian realities of day-to-day governing. They are also growing wary and fatigued. They have learned that their president is not invincible, and they are less cocky in their once unshakable certainty that their guy always does just the right things in just the right ways. They are learning that Washington often changes you more than you change it. They have also become more circumspect, as they have learned how hard it is to stay in the public’s good graces and how elusive bipartisan tranquility can be.  Ashley Parker works for the editorial department in the Washington bureau of The Times. This is her first feature article for the magazine.  This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:  An article on Page 46 this weekend about young people working in the Obama administration misspells the name of the New Hampshire city where two of them, Herbie Ziskend and Samantha Tubman, met. It is Keene, not Keane.  An article on Page 46 this weekend about young people working in the Obama administration misspells the name of the New Hampshire city where two of them, Herbie Ziskend and Samantha Tubman, met. It is Keene, not Keane.
A group of young White House staff members live together and (more or less) have their lives taped.