Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  That night the Travelers all went for a Thai feast at the Lotus of Siam, a James Beard Award–winning restaurant that shared a strip mall with a nail salon–tanning parlor combo. When the pork larb arrived (spicy level 6), one of the regular Travelers, without any malice or bias, proposed we go around the table and say whether we thought Hillary would win, starting it off with “I don’t think she’s going to be president. I just don’t. You go next . . .”

  But the rest of us just looked down at our sticky rice and papaya salad, afraid to voice our opinions even in the anonymity of an off-strip Vegas restaurant. Ken Thomas finally said that as an AP reporter he couldn’t answer that question. And if the AP wouldn’t do it, none of us would. As usual, I felt obligated to fill the silence, so I said something like “Well, it’s hers to lose . . .”

  Had I answered the question honestly, I would’ve said of course Hillary was going to win and we would all be going to Washington in a year and a half to cover the FWP. Name one Republican who could beat her. But I probably would’ve also said she needed to get her shit together ASAP.

  I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. The Clintons had planned to spend the August doldrums at a beachside estate in Amagansett that cost $110,000 for a two-week stay where they would bask in their wealthy friends’ adoration while picking up $2,700 per person.

  Instead, their hedge-fund manager and real estate magnate and fashion scion friends approached Bill and Hillary apoplectic about the campaign’s inability to squelch the email controversy and Hillary’s refusal to apologize. Bill, believing the whole thing a “witch hunt,” was emphatic that she had nothing to apologize for.

  Hillary blamed Brooklyn. On one conference call Hillary cut Robby Mook off: “I need a James Carville not a George Stephanopoulos defending me on this!” The analogy confounded the newer aides who didn’t register the reference to the 1992 campaign. Robby was a Vermont preteen with a budding interest in school plays when the Gennifer Flowers scandal broke and everyone agreed George had wimped out.

  Susan Thomases, Hillary’s chief defender back then (“The Clintons’ Bad Cop,” as the Post called her), said Stephanopoulos was “the squeamish guy of the century—‘Ooh, ooh, I can’t stand this campaign,’ I said, ‘Then quit. Your theatrics are just adorable, but quit. If you can’t handle it, quit.’”

  Susan had multiple sclerosis now and was homebound. Hillary missed her. That was the kind of loyalty and defender she craved. Instead, she got a millennial armed with data and analytics.

  Hillary also reminded the newer aides about her fraught dynamic with the New York Times. She’d seen this movie before, she told them. “They’ll absolutely hammer me over emails and then they’ll give me the biggest wet kiss of an endorsement and it won’t matter by then,” she said. (After the election, Bill would spread a more absurd Times conspiracy: The publisher had struck a deal with Trump that we’d destroy Hillary on her emails to help him get elected, if he kept driving traffic and boosting the company’s stock price.)

  I don’t want to blame the victim. We did all hyperventilate over her emails. But Hillary and her campaign never had a strategy to change the conversation. By my tally, Brooklyn turned down forty-seven of my interview requests, including to discuss Hillary’s economic proposals, immigration, her work at the Children’s Defense Fund, and her years as a working mother in Arkansas. My Times colleagues asked for interviews about women’s issues, foreign policy, and national security, among many other substantive topics. Any of those stories would’ve likely kicked emails off the front page, even if only briefly. Trump understood our gluttonous short attention span better than anyone, but especially better than Hillary, whose media strategy amounted to her ignoring us.

  But that August, Brooklyn knew it had to try something. When the Clintons got back to Chappaqua from the Hamptons, aides presented the Clintons with the findings from two pre–Labor Day focus groups. Voters liked when she’d shown contrition at a campaign stop in Iowa saying her use of personal email “clearly wasn’t the best choice” and “I take responsibility for that decision.” They wanted more of that.

  Hillary mulled all this as she campaigned in New Hampshire over Labor Day weekend. She was more introspective than usual. “When you run for office, it’s a very challenging experience,” Hillary said on a stop in Portsmouth.

  Democrats I talked to described her campaign with a single stinging word: joyless. At the end of the press conference, BuzzFeed’s Ruby Cramer said to Hillary she’d wanted to ask a question that wasn’t about emails but felt obligated to stick to the news.

  “Oh, come on, liberate yourself and ask the question you want to ask,” Hillary, ever the feminist, said. Ruby asked if she thought she was running a joyful campaign.

  “I like getting out and talking and figuring out what’s on people’s minds,” Hillary said. Then, she hoisted her arms overhead and said in a you-can-all-go-fuck-yourselves tone, “And off we go, joyfully!”

  Three days later, she apologized.

  It could’ve only happened with ABC News’ David Muir. The Guys aggressively shushed me ahead of the interview when they said how flirty Hillary was with Muir and I replied I’d heard he was gay. “Shhhhh. Hillary can not know that,” one of them said.

  For all the lesbian theories, Hillary enjoys nothing more than flirting with a handsome, preferably straight man. She constantly talks about how she married a husband more attractive than she is, which isn’t really true, but it always told me a lot about Hillary that she thought it was.

  This flirty Hillary played out on the campaign trail. In Hanover, New Hampshire, she waxed nostalgic about a photographer she’d been set up with on a blind date in college, later describing him as “artistic and he was kind of poetic and in those days, you know, you were choosing between anguished young men over art and anguished young men over Vietnam . . . and he was anguished over art and all that came with it.” When a beefy, smooth-headed supporter in his midforties stood up to ask a question at a town hall in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Hillary interrupted, “I do think this bald look is pretty attractive.”

  Even after the back-and-forth about her email server, Hillary loved to spar with Ed Henry. She would regularly look past her almost entirely female press corps to call on the Fox News correspondent, with his cherub cheeks and Pucci pocket squares.

  Whenever CNN’s Dan Merica, who when he grew out his strawberry-blond beard vaguely resembled a young Bill Clinton, shouted an airy question at Hillary, she’d toss her head back and giggle and say, “Oh, Dan.” After Chris Christie endorsed Trump, Dan decided to ask whether Hillary was jealous that she hadn’t gotten Christie’s backing. Brown Loafers Guy, who’d become friends with Dan as they were among the few men on the road, said of the subsequent exchange, “She responded with a prolonged smile (you could see the gears turning) and then said ‘Dan, I really like you. I really, really like you.’ They are basically courting each other at this point.”

  Brooklyn had tested Hillary’s body language with various options for anchors to conduct the apology interview. Focus groups really responded to the ease she projected sitting across from Muir, named one of People magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive, 2014.” If she had to apologize, at least she could do it with an interviewer who didn’t make her look as if she wanted to hurl across the divide and suffocate the life out of them with her bare hands, as she had looked with Andrea Mitchell and CNN’s Brianna Keilar. Brianna had been selected for the first sit-down interview of the campaign in a mix-up after Huma told the press team, without specifying, “HRC wants the blonde.” They hadn’t been sure which blonde and chose the one who covered the campaign.

  Press aides in Brooklyn buried their faces in their hands when Mitchell asked on MSNBC if Hillary wanted to apologize to the American people for her email use, and Hillary said, “I’m sorry that this has been confusing to people . . .” She gave a similar nonapology to the AP.

  With Muir, Hillary finally dropped the ambiguities. “I think in retrospect
, certainly, as I look back on it now, even though it was allowed, I should have used two accounts, one for personal, one for work-related emails. That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.”

  Later that afternoon, I’d pulled some strings from my old beat covering media to get seats at The Ellen DeGeneres Show three rows from the temporary stage set up above the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center. Maybe it was all the talk of girl power or the adoration from the other celebrity guests—including Amy Schumer (plus roller skates), Pink, and a five-year-old presidential history buff in a miniature version of Hillary’s pantsuit—but when Ellen asked about the email controversy, Hillary had already reverted. “I’m sorry for all the confusion that has ensued,” she said.

  19

  The Pied Piper

  Hot Springs, Arkansas, August 2015

  Brooklyn called him the Pied Piper—a charismatic showman who could drive the Republican rats out of the race. “We don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read an early strategy memo to the DNC. “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates [including Trump, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz] so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.”

  An agenda for an upcoming campaign meeting sent by Robby Mook’s office asked, “How do we maximize Trump?”

  For the first ten months of her campaign, Hillary went around the country propping up Trump, portraying him as the unbridled id of the GOP.

  After Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, Hillary told Democrats in Little Rock, “There’s nothing funny about the hate he is spewing at immigrants and their families.” But she quickly added that Trump was merely saying in harsh terms what the rest of the GOP candidates believed. “The sad truth is, if you look at many of their policies, it can be hard to tell the difference.”

  Joel Benenson must’ve told me fifteen times, “They’re all cut from the same cloth.” Paul Begala, the affable Texan (via New Jersey) known as the yin to James Carville’s yang in ’92, told me Trump would help Hillary “for a variety of reasons” by exposing “the GOP as the radical right-wing anger society it has become.” He argued, “The GOP’s problem is not Mr. Trump; it is the extreme and angry nature of their base.”

  The first time I saw Trump he was wearing a tuxedo. He had Melania on his arm, and they wove through banquet tables decorated with white ranunculus and tea candles under the domed ceiling of the New York Public Library. I was a Condé Nast rover and an executive asked me to drop off a fat white envelope to an editor at table 2. I placed the envelope on the tablecloth and beelined for the exit before I could grab a flute of champagne or try the blini coated with caviar and crème fraîche. I was leaving the gala just as Trump arrived. There was something about seeing him that gave me the sense I’d reached a milestone of New York transplants. There’s no going back to Peoria after you’ve been at the same party as Donald J. Trump . . . even if I was the help.

  Our paths crossed several times after that, when I covered Hollywood for the Journal and he was promoting The Apprentice. Then, in 2013, Trump and Ivanka scheduled a lunch in an executive dining room at the New York Times to talk to business reporters about the Trump Organization. No masthead editors or political reporters signed up. Each time someone asked a substantive question about, say, P&L on the post-office hotel conversion in Washington or net revenue on licensing agreements in China, Trump would give a couple-word hyperbolic answer (“It’s going to be the best . . .”) and then swivel his head left to Ivanka, who would then respond in impressive granular detail, sometimes pulling slides and charts out of a camel-colored Ivanka-branded tote. Afterward, I shook Trump’s hand and rushed back to my desk feeling that I’d had a nice break from cafeteria food to chat with a reality TV star and his pretty, capable daughter.

  And the day Trump announced he was running, I admitted to a couple of Times editors that I’d watched eight seasons of The Apprentice and that we should do a story about it. They told me political reporters wouldn’t be writing about Trump. “We have enough candidates to cover,” one editor said. “Let the TV writers do it.”

  Months later, it got back to Trump that I’d watched his TV show. He was already the Republican nominee, and he called me to ask if I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger would be as good as he was on The Apprentice. “Uh, I don’t think so. I don’t know,” I responded, cautious that anything I said could be used against me. “I don’t really have time to watch anymore.”

  Then there was our Polish housekeeper, Wanda, who is so bad at her job that a couple of friends who’ve also used her for years came home early once to find Wanda watching TV in their bed. But she is a solid person and charges eighty dollars to clean a two-bedroom apartment, including laundry. She also happened to clean Don Jr.’s and Eric Trump’s New York apartments. In 2014, Eric and Lara invited Wanda to their wedding at Mar-a-Lago—which, despite what anyone thinks about the Trump sons, was a class-act thing to do.

  I was in Little Rock in July 2015 to cover Hillary’s speech to the annual Jefferson-Jackson Democratic fundraising dinner. I hadn’t seen Trump as a candidate yet, so I arrived a day early and drove an hour to Hot Springs, a quaint redneck spa town in the Ouachita Mountains where Bill spent his childhood. Trump was the keynote speaker at an Arkansas GOP dinner.

  Annie and I got there early and wandered around the Hot Springs Convention Center trying to find Trump’s press conference. Beautifully dressed African American families, little girls in Easter egg–pink dresses, their mothers in starling-blue lace dresses with matching hats and handbags, filled the hallways. We were so confused. “Why are they supporting Trump?” I asked. That’s when a voice announced, “The Regional Convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses is next door at the Bank of the Ozarks Arena. I repeat, next door.”

  Trump walked into the drab conference room soaked in sweat. There were about a dozen of us, mostly local press. There was none of the commotion of a Hillary press conference. We all stood around casually ready for our Friday night entertainment.

  “Ah, it’s nice and cool in here,” Trump said, dabbing his drenched forehead with crinkled Kleenexes he’d pulled out from his suit pocket. A couple of dandruff-size white dots stuck to his forehead and temples, like snowflakes on orange AstroTurf. I couldn’t believe it. Not only did Hillary never sweat, even if she did, her team would’ve never allowed her to do something as bush league as wipe her sweat in front of the press. Trump flicked his wrist at a couple of photographers. “How about you go over there? You don’t need to see towels on my face.”

  He reminded us several times that he owned “some of the greatest real estate assets in the world.” He declared, “I have a great relationship with the Mexican people.” And he wasted little time calling Arianna Huffington a “terrible woman” and a “major, major source of problems for a lot of people, especially her ex-husband.”

  I remembered crashing the Teneo holiday party earlier that year. Declan Kelly, an Irish PR man and Hillary donor whom she rewarded with a State Department position, cofounded the firm with Doug Band. They offered corporate clients access to what Band called “Bill Clinton Inc.” The Guys called Declan “a fucking leprechaun.”

  At the party, held coincidentally at Trump’s favorite haunt, the 21 Club, Declan kept talking about how Teneo “offers global solutions in a borderless world.” That’s when a prominent New York Democrat leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You can’t sell air forever.” And that’s what popped in my head as I listened to Trump talk that night: You can’t sell air forever.

  I couldn’t think of anything else so I asked The Donald what he thought of Hillary’s plan to offer tax incentives to companies that share profits with employees. “Hillary Clinton unveiled her economic plan, part of that was profit sharing. I wanted to know what you think of her plan. Do you share profits with employees?” You can take the girl out o
f the Wall Street Journal . . .

  I stopped transcribing—or really even listening—after he repeated for the third time some variation of “I’ve had so many great employees, many of them Hispanics.” Then he shifted: “You have to understand Hillary . . .” That perked me up; after all, I’d spent most of my adult life trying to understand Hillary. “Wall Street is backing Hillary. Guys I know very well from New York, they’re pouring money into her campaign. They’re doing it for one reason, so don’t be misled by Hillary.”

  Then he made a puppet motion alternating his diminutive hands up and down as if he were pulling the strings of a Hillary marionette. “She’s totally controlled by people that love China.” Up, down. “They will totally control Hillary just like a puppet.” Up, down, up, down. Trump didn’t steal Bernie’s line of attack. He had it in his head all along.

  A couple of weeks later, in early August, the Travelers, united by the quiet drudgery of covering the Hillary campaign, convinced her communications director, Jen Palmieri, to let us watch the first Republican primary debate with the campaign staff over pepperoni pizza at the Brooklyn HQ.

  “C’mon, you can spin us in real time,” I argued.

  We dug into the Domino’s boxes half listening as Carly Fiorina obliterated Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, and the other minor GOP candidates. I knew that Carly would get her fifteen minutes. A lot of what came out of her mouth was borderline crazy, but I still admired Carly’s ballsy self-delusion. As Vonnegut wrote, “We are what we pretend to be . . .”

  In 2010, I was writing a WSJ. Magazine profile on Carly’s US Senate race, and we’d road-tripped up the California coast together. She’d just recovered from breast cancer and jumped into a Senate race against Barbara Boxer. She brushed off her abysmal record at H-P and even portrayed her primary opponent as a demon sheep with glowing red eyes in what remains the strangest attack ad in the pantheon of political programming. Carly and I got trashed together at the Madonna Inn, me on a house red and Carly on martinis (extra dry) in a Pepto-Bismol-pink leather booth at the Gold Rush Steak House. We then laughed our way back to our suites with their faux-brick fireplaces.