PUEBLO, Colo.—It’s a long path from playing summer pickup basketball games on the “Slab” in Pueblo to running the White House visitors office for President Barack Obama, but Ellie Schafer has made that journey.
Schafer, 40, and a 1986 graduate of East High School, spent the past two years being part of a different kind of fast break: The nearly nonstop work of being an Obama campaign staffer as the Illinois senator fought through a crowded Democratic field of contenders to the final showdown with Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
“There were incredibly long days during the campaign I was certain were never going to end,” Schafer said with a laugh during a recent telephone interview. “But on Election Night, with all that celebrating, I remember wondering, ‘Where did the time go?'”
Now, Schafer has the job of overseeing visits to the White House: The daily public tours, the celebrated Easter Egg hunt and Christmas-tree lighting, the T-ball baseball games and all the rest. The White House is the president’s residence, but it is also a historic site that Americans visit in droves.
“And that’s how the first family approaches it,” Schafer said. “President Obama and the first lady believe the White House is very much the people’s house, and they want it to be as accessible as possible.” Schafer is the daughter of Joe and Sue Gersick, who now live in Castle Rock.
She fondly remembers growing up in Pueblo as part of a big clan of family and friends. Sunday dinners could bring as many as 15 people around the family table in Belmont.
In an e-mail about her favorite memories of Pueblo, Schafer listed playing basketball and running track at East High, attending the Colorado State Fair and eating Pueblo pizza.
“In Pueblo, I always felt I was part of a neighborhood, a community,” she recalled. “I may not have known everyone in my high school class at East, but I knew a lot of them.”
Schafer got her bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Denver in 1990 and found herself volunteering for political campaigns.
Not that politics was her ambition.
“I’d always been a passionate kid, the one to bring the stray dog home,” she said. “I’m not sure what I wanted to be, just that I wanted my work to make a difference.”
Over time, Schafer migrated to San Francisco where she decided to start earning a living from her activism. She started a political consulting company.
After working on city and then statewide elections, she put more of her efforts into conservation and environmental causes. A Democrat to be sure, Schafer said her political work became more issue-oriented than simply partisan.
Then in 2004, she went to work in Massachusetts for Sen. John Kerry’s unsuccessful presidential campaign as part of his advance team.
“That was heartbreaking,” she said. “You put so much of yourself into a presidential campaign and when you come so close and still lose. … That takes a lot out of you. I wasn’t certain I could do that again.”
A Democratic friend told her to take a closer look at then-Sen. Obama, the young Illinois lawmaker who was doing a book tour with an eye toward running for president. Schafer did some volunteer work for Obama and became convinced to join up when Obama announced his White House run in February 2007. She spent the next 18 months crisscrossing the country with the campaign.
“By 2007, I’d been around enough politicians to know if a person was real or not,” Schafer said. “Right from the beginning, I had a sense that Obama was the right candidate. His campaign was able to bundle up all this hope and optimism and when you saw the commitment from the people on the ground—well, it seemed like a no-brainer that he was going to win. Not that there weren’t times when I wasn’t extremely nervous.”
One of those nervous times came in the Iowa primary, where news reports said Obama was behind in the polling. But Schafer could see the momentum building in the army of volunteers working for Obama.
“You had the sense he was going to win. That’s not what the daily press reports said,” she recalled.
Pueblo people are aware that Dana Perino, former President George W. Bush’s press secretary, graduated from Colorado State University-Pueblo. How does Schafer feel about inheriting Perino’s mantle as the Steel City’s own connection to the new Obama White House?
“That’s fine with me,” Schafer laughed. “I thought Dana did a good job as press secretary and when you see what it takes to actually run the White House Press Office, it’s an impressive operation.”
Schafer said it still gives her pause when she goes to work each day at the White House.
“I get choked up, I admit it,” she said. “It is such a special place with so much history all around you. When President Obama arrived the other day on the Marine One helicopter, I was outside watching, and I literally had goosebumps. It’s such an amazing thing to be here, to be part of all this.”
