by Amy Chozick
I thought maybe, despite their partisan differences, Hillary would have some feminist pride that a female candidate was standing up to Trump while wiping the debate floor with every other GOP candidate. Nope. Hillary despised her.
“One of the reasons I’m really excited to be working on this campaign is because we are making history to elect the first woman president . . . Hillary Clinton,” Robby Mook said when I asked if Hillary was proud that a woman stood out on the Republican side.
It’s always been like that with Hillary. Feminism is conditional. “Elizabeth Dole: She is the woman people think Hillary is,” Diane Blair wrote when Dole ran for the Republican nomination in 1999.
When the main GOP debate came on, everyone pushed their pizza crust aside and stared transfixed at the TV set up on a stand in the front of the room like substitute teacher day in middle school. During commercial breaks, Robby would pop in to talk to the Travelers. He salivated when the debate came back on and Trump started to speak. “Shhhhh,” Robby said, practically pressing his nose up to the TV. “I’ve gahtz to get me some Trump.” Robby thought Rubio would be the nominee. Podesta was bullish on Kasich. Bill and Hillary, still stuck in the 1990s, feared the Bush surname most of all.
As the third GOP debate approached, Brooklyn assured us all that the strategy was working—Hillary had elevated Trump, using him to weaken the rest of the Republicans. Voters were starting to tune in, and the Trump sheen would soon fade. “He’s a summer fling,” senior aides kept telling me. It was mid-October.
20
“Spontaneity Is Embargoed Until 4:00 p.m.”
Manchester, November 2015
No matter how hard I try, I can only see Manchester through the filter of soot that sat on the windowsill of my rented Subaru. The city is a dusky, weary, unfussy place split in two by the spiky banks of the Merrimack River. It’s too far from Boston, where I’d flown into early that morning, to be part of its exurban sprawl, but too close to have the charm of rural New England. It was November, a year before the general election. I pulled the collar of my jacket tight around my neck and shivered on the short walk up the parking garage ramp and into JD’s Tavern, the sports bar attached to the lobby of the Radisson where Hillary would soon arrive to share drinks, bar snacks, and some strained small talk with her traveling press.
In the seven months she’d been a candidate, Hillary had only had one off-the-record drinking session with her traveling press. I hadn’t been in Iowa and missed it. But I heard a TV journalist made the rookie mistake of asking how she met Bill, allowing Hillary to filibuster with a story so immortalized in memoirs and speeches and popular Clinton lore that I could recite it verbatim. Oh gosh, it was 1971, at the Yale Law Library . . .
The interactions I’d had with Hillary since the campaign started had almost all happened by accident. In September, she’d stopped in at the Union Diner car in Laconia to shake hands. She met a high school French teacher who introduced Hillary to half a dozen of her students, who all wanted a photo. I stood to her left and when Hillary pivoted to make sure she’d posed with all the students, she looked at me and said, “She’s not in the class. This one I know, she’s not in the class. She may speak French, but she’s not in the class.”
Shortly before that encounter, I’d written a story looking ahead to the fall. I interviewed aides in the Brooklyn headquarters about their new “efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seemed wooden and overly cautious.” The campaign brass wanted to put the Summer of Discontent behind them. The Guys came through by providing me with an interview with Robby and Jen. I’d hardly left the building when The Guys hosted a conference call with the entire press corps telling everyone almost exactly what they’d told me (minus the part where Robby joked that the high point of the campaign had been my favorable front-page profile of him). I always recorded interviews and took handwritten notes, starring anything that stood out. That way, when I listened back to the audio, I could glance at my illegible scribble and see which quotes had jumped out during the conversation and what I may not have picked up on in the moment. On the subway back to Midtown, I plugged in my earphones and listened to my Sony voice recorder, the one I’d bought eight years earlier in Shinjuku, with the Japanese writing on the side. Everything I had thought I could build a story around seemed stale now that top campaign aides had given the same talking points to the rest of the press. Toward the middle of the audio, we’d discussed how Hillary would try to show voters her softer, more personable side. It was the only original reporting I had.
That evening, I sat in Carolyn’s office watching as she scrunched her forehead and lowered her reading glasses to edit my story. I could tell how rough a day she was having based on the number of empty Diet Coke cans and the font size on her screen. Carolyn cut and pasted entire paragraphs, plucking the juiciest Yorkie details (like the campaign’s recognition that the Everyday Americans phrase wasn’t resonating) out of a mumble of politicalese (“Our favorability is higher than any Republican”). Even as I reminded myself that a Carolyn edit always made even the dullest stories jump off the page, reading over her shoulder still gave me the reticent, disembodied feeling of a patient watching a surgeon perform an operation on their vital organs.
When she’d stitched it all back together, she shot me a “playback,” what we called the edited version of a story, and sent it on to a copy editor, who debated me about whether we needed to explain what Hillary’s “bowl-off” against Ellen DeGeneres meant. “I think it’s obvious,” I replied. The front-page headline read Hillary to Show More Humor and Heart, Aides Say.
The backlash was immediate. “Today’s @nytimes story on HRC read more like The Onion: Her detailed plan to show more authenticity and spontaneity. #Justdoit!” former Obama adviser David Axelrod tweeted.
The #ImWithHer crowd always assumed the campaign disliked my coverage because of HER EMAILS or my reporting on the Clinton Foundation. But that wasn’t it. It was the Yorkie and Bathroomgate and that the day she declared her candidacy, I’d written that she hadn’t offered a clear rationale for why she was running. Hillary hated that I’d broken the news that the mysterious “Diane Reynolds” in her private State Department emails had been Chelsea writing under her preferred pseudonym. But nothing put Hillary over the edge quite like the “Humor and Heart” story. Donors and top Democrats called her campaign to complain. Jen and Robby took most of Hillary’s wrath, but The Guys got it, too, for letting me into Brooklyn in the first place. The fall, when Hillary was supposed to restart, instead became what some Democrats called the “Spontaneity is EMBARGOED until 4:00 p.m.” phase of the campaign.
That’s the thing about being a candidate reporter; you can’t hide. If Hillary had to learn to be an inflatable bop bag, bouncing back after whatever the traveling press threw at her that day, The Guys were a cement wall, rough and unyielding and able to block me from receiving basic logistical information or asking a question. Ever since the “Humor and Heart” piece, I’d been iced out. At an event at the New Hampshire State House before driving to Hanover, Windham, and ending the day in Manchester, Hillary (and Brown Loafers) displayed a superhuman cold shoulder, looking right past my multiple shouts of “SECRETARY! SECRETARY!” Instead, Hillary answered a question about why Trump got better ratings than she did on SNL (“Consider the performance.”), and adding insult to injury, she called on Fox News, twice.
Obama handled this dynamic differently. Back in August 2008, I wrote a Weekend Journal feature about presidents and body image and whether an overweight electorate could relate to Obama given his intense workout schedule and zero percent body fat. (Not the Onion.) Okay, so it was an inane idea, and I was widely mocked. The headline Too Fit to Be President? and Murdoch’s recently buying the paper didn’t help matters.
Later that day, the press pool trailed Obama to a roadside farmers market in Florida. He ordered a strawberry milkshake, and as he took a long sip, he looked right at me. We locked eyes as he gulped down the frot
hy mix. Then he said, “Wow, this milkshake is delicious. Maybe if I had one of these every day, I wouldn’t be such a skinny guy.”
Obama then ordered strawberry milkshakes for the entire press corps.
I can safely say Hillary didn’t want to buy me a milkshake that day in New Hampshire. On the upside, my reporting was right. She started to phase out “Everyday Americans.” She had a new favorite line: “Get Ahead and Stay Ahead.”
Asked about the email server—“I will continue doing my part for transparency. I’m also going to focus on what’s most important . . . helping families get ahead and stay ahead.” Pressed to release the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches—“. . . I have plans that will actually help families get ahead and stay ahead.” Teary stories at a town hall about the toll of the state’s opioid epidemic would often be answered with “. . . we need to make sure every child can get ahead and stay ahead.”
Hillary still treated New Hampshire like the womb, a safe, cozy place that made Bill the “Comeback Kid” in 1992 and resuscitated her own campaign in 2008.
Seven years later, she poured herself into the state, feeling as though she knew the place. She said she knew she’d never get the angry voters, the ones who wanted to send Wall Street bankers and CEOs and anyone with a Peloton bicycle to the guillotine. When a midlevel spokesman drafted a statement that said Hillary wouldn’t “stop until everyday families can get ahead and stay ahead no matter who gets in her way,” the campaign brass replied, “Too much with the ‘no matter who gets in her way,’ so would drop that.” Hillary remained convinced the country hadn’t changed that much while she’d been at the State Department. She was confident she could sway the convincible, rosier voters even if they disliked her. “Hey guys, be angry, and then let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work,” she told students at New England College. “Anger is a powerful emotion, but it’s not a plan.”
She told aides that during these town halls, she could see voters’ posture change as she explained her practical solutions to help them “get ahead and stay ahead.” Shoulders would relax, arms would unfurl, scowls would soften. She had this.
What she didn’t realize at the time—and what I didn’t grasp either until Bernie beat her in New Hampshire by twenty-two points—was that getting ahead doesn’t mean anything to people who have nowhere to go.
I myself was so influenced by having seen firsthand how New Hampshire had saved Hillary back in 2008 that, despite signs Bernie would win, I too believed she had a lock on the state. And she’d had such a masterful turn in the first primary debate in Vegas that the Democrats who had hankered for Biden promptly decided there was “no path” for the veep. Bernie had done Hillary a favor in declaring that people “are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” In contrast to her demeanor that summer, she seemed breezy and sociable that fall in New Hampshire. Which was why, after a “Fighting for Us” town hall at a high school in Windham, Brown Loafers sent an email around saying the secretary would like us to join her for “OTR drinks” in Manchester.
She used to do these things all the time. When I think about Hillary in 2008, I don’t see her on the debate stage or working the rope line at a Lions Club. Instead, she is gliding between the aisles of the Hill Force One toward the press, a goblet of Yellow Tail in one hand, and balancing the other against the back of an AP reporter’s seat.
In 2008, her traveling press corps was largely populated by New York guys who covered Hillary as a senator for the tabloids. The New York Post, Newsday, the Daily News, the Observer—all had reporters on the plane. (Eight years later, none of them did.) In an interview I did with Mel Brooks once, he described Dick Cavett as “astonishingly non-Jewish. He thought the Borscht Belt was something you wore.” I always thought of Hillary like that, astonishingly non-Jewish. But she kept up with these mostly Jewish jokesters and would often show her sardonic side (directed, on more than one occasion, at Rudy Giuliani, and an African dictator’s alleged STD) and a quick wit, even when the topics of masturbation and ferrets came up (she seemed in favor of the former, against the latter). She even revealed a romantic side (offering nut-covered chocolates on Valentine’s Day and calling reporters’ girlfriends—“I want to personally apologize to you that Fernando is with me and not you on Valentine’s Day”).
At one off-the-record drinking session with the traveling press in the wood-lined bar of the William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, Hillary had been so candid over Blue Moon and oranges (her preferred beer) that when she left we jotted down Hillary haiku, passing around cocktail napkins and each adding a line, confessions in five to seven syllables . . .
Pittsburgh campaign stop
Blue Moon pints with oranges
I killed Vince Foster
In fact, I doubt I would have been so drawn to covering Hillary’s second presidential campaign had it not been for seeing her in these settings, which had led to the dopey notion that I had unique insight into who she really was. “You just don’t understand what she’s like in private,” I’d tell anyone who would listen after the 2008 primary. Another favorite observation: “Obama is charming and charismatic to fifty thousand people, but Hillary is just as charming and charismatic to five.”
But that 2008 image of Hillary had faded by the fall of her second campaign. At times, we were so bored and desperate for stories that we analyzed Hillary’s head gestures. “Look at that. Wow, she is nodding up a storm,” John Heilemann, then of Bloomberg Politics, said on his cable show. Mark Halperin agreed, “Almost a minute’s worth during not a very long event.” The Times tallied forty-three head nods per minute in a discussion about community banking in Cedar Falls.
This created a vicious cycle.
Hillary looked at her ’16 press corps and thought we were hopelessly young and driven entirely by clicks and the financial demands on our struggling news outlets. (The head-nodding stories admittedly didn’t help matters.) She missed her high-minded State Department press corps, worldly, substantive reporters who didn’t care about the horse race, understood the intricacies of Hillary’s plan to arm the moderate Syrian rebels, and could find Kyrgyzstan on the map.
In the White House, Hillary once said that had her press corps been all women, she might do what Eleanor Roosevelt did and hold 340 press conferences. “That made a big impression on me,” Hillary told reporters in 1994 after answering an hour of questions about her cattle futures at the famous “pretty in pink” press conference. “Now, Mrs. Roosevelt only invited women reporters. I don’t think I could get away with that.”
Twenty-two years later Hillary had an almost entirely female press corps, and she wouldn’t have even known our names had it not been for the Face Book.
The campaign’s press shop assembled an album with all our faces, names, and news outlets. Hillary studied the Face Book with her briefings not so that she could occasionally say, “Hi, Tamara,” or “How are you today, Monica?” or “Good morning, Hannah,” but so that she wouldn’t mistake us for voters and—gawd forbid—accidentally interact with us when we approached her on the rope line.
The thing about a mostly female press corps was that Hillary likes men, preferably the damaged, witty, brilliant kind. She told aides she knew women reporters would be harder on her. We’d be jealous and catty and more spiteful than men. We’d be impervious to her flirting.
We were so starved for information that on the rare occasions when Brown Loafers did come by to brief us, we’d behave with such giddy commotion you’d think he was a Chippendales dancer at a bachelorette party. We’d swarm him, waiting to be fed. Brown Loafers would tell us (off the record, not for attribution) that Hillary planned to be in Council Bluffs and Sioux City on Friday. And we’d respond with “Thanks so much for the guidance . . .” and “Absolutely, we’ll consider this off the record . . .” and “Can we do this again?” as if we’d been exclusively fed front-page headlines like Hillary to File for Divorce or Hillary, Fearing Defeat, to Withdraw from Iowa. Definitely not
Hillary to Talk About How the Economy Can Work for Everyone in Council Bluffs.
I could’ve taken the journalistic high ground and refused to attend the OTR in Manchester, calling it a night at the Holiday Inn Express with some takeout from the Uno Pizzeria and a heaping side of righteous indignation about how cozy the rest of the Travelers were. But the truth was I wanted to cover Hillary as a real person, and to do that I needed a reminder that she was more than the tentative candidate with the tight grin whom I’d watched from a distance for months.
The carpeted dining room at JD’s Tavern, up a few steps from the sunken bar area, smelled of cooking oil and malt. The room was quiet, with just a few men sipping beers and the white noise of hockey highlights on an overhead TV, when we all stormed in.
“I had that spot saved! What the fuck?”
“Did somebody move my laptop?”
“Guys, where do we think HRC will sit?”
“Where did she sit the last time in Iowa?”
“In the middle but not exactly in the middle, sort of to the left . . .”
“Your left or my left?”
“I don’t know! It was a different setup.”
It was like reporter roulette, everyone taking our best bet about where Hillary would sit and then banking our wide asses and puffer coats on it.
The trick had been to try to position ourselves close enough to make eye contact. The worst seats were the ones several spots away from her but on the same side of the table, making it nearly impossible for Hillary to see you as we all packed in shoulder to shoulder like schoolkids playing red rover. Let Hillary come over . . .