October 2004

Alums Set the Stage for Kerry and Edwards - Literally

Sarah Moss, SOC/BA '01, and Tyler Mounsey, SPA/BA '01, after producing a town hall meeting in Colorado.

Sarah Moss and Tyler Mounsey have been working lots of long hours lately. The class of 2001 alumni – Moss from SOC and Mounsey from SPA - work for the Kerry-Edwards campaign as part of the national advance team. For months now, they’ve been traveling to cities across the country five or six days before Senator Kerry or Senator Edwards is due to make a campaign stop, literally setting the scene for the upcoming event.

Both Moss and Mounsey, who met at AU their freshman year and have been dating for six years, hire vendors to build and set up staging, lighting, and sound, explains Moss. “First, we work with the local field office to find potential sites. Then, we secure the necessary permissions, whether from a university or the city or a private company to use the space… We determine if there will be a banner or backdrop, where the American flags will go, and how we’ll funnel in the crowds.”

That task usually requires renting thousands of feet of metal bike barricade, which can be difficult in small towns – especially when another candidate is campaigning the same day. “We cross paths with the Bush campaign pretty often,” remarks Moss.

Advance staff also work very closely with the U.S. Secret Service to make sure everything is as secure for the candidates as possible. On the day of an event, Moss is one of two event producers who makes sure the sound cues happen at the right time, and that the traveling staff who have just come off the airplane with the candidate have everything they need.

Perhaps Moss’s favorite part of the job is figuring out what the picture will be that people will see on the news that night and therefore determining where the press will stand during the event. “My personal goal is to have a great picture on the cover of the newspaper the next day or on CNN that night that communicates a positive message about the candidate. It’s that tangible factor that you can say, ‘I did this, it was a big empty field and I designed and built it, and now we have a picture with 30,000 people in it.’”

There are about 300 advance staff on the Kerry-Edwards campaign team, divided into numerous smaller teams that serve Senator Kerry, Senator Edwards, their wives and children, and sometimes “surrogate speakers” such as former Senator (and AU adjunct faculty member) Max Cleland, Moss explains. For each city in which one of the candidates plans to make an appearance, campaign headquarters tells the team what kind of event they want, such as a town hall meeting or a rally, and the advance team hits the ground running to make it happen. “Rallies are my favorite,” says Moss. “Being around a large crowd is really energizing and it really energizes the senator, too.”

The world of advance is fluid and fast-paced, describes Moss. “We often work 18-hour days... things change at a moment's notice.” In fact, upon trying to set up a time to talk for this article, Moss noted she wasn’t sure what she would be doing in five hours, much less in a day or two.

Advance staff are rarely told where they’ll be next until a day before they leave for a given city. Moss said she has tended to visit the same swing states, including Florida, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Arizona, Michigan.

Moss, who also helped organize the Denver AU Alumni chapter, says the highlights of her job far outweigh the grueling hours. “I get to meet hundreds of new people every week. I love the travel, I love that I’m working for a cause I believe very strongly in, and I love meeting people who are excited [about Kerry-Edwards], too. You don’t do this job if you don’t love it. It’s really a lifestyle, not a job.”

With the frenetic pace Moss and her colleagues keep, it is little surprise that she just officially met John Kerry and shook his hand at an event in Washington, D.C. “We don't have much time interacting with Senator Kerry or Senator Edwards, because when they get to our sites is when we are busiest doing our jobs cueing music, and so on,” she notes.

For any wanna-be campaign staffers, Moss says the team does hire people right out of college, even though she was hired with several years of PR, field organizing, and event planning under her belt. “We have some people here who’ve been doing advance since McGovern in 1972,” she noted.

Moss caught the politics bug at AU after she took a class with SOC professor Lenny Steinhorn that included a field trip to GMMB, an Ad/PR firm in Georgetown, at which she ended up interning and then working for. She also did freelance work for GMMB after she moved back to her hometown, Denver, in 2003. “It all goes back to AU,” she remarks.

Soon, Moss and Mounsey hope to return to D.C., and get jobs with the new Kerry-Edwards administration after the election, if it all goes as they hope.

-Melissa Reichley

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