Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  That was how I envisioned Hillary’s consultants when they sat in the conference room of her private office in midtown Manhattan to contemplate what to call this curious specimen of 121 million Americans who were technically middle class. Everyday Americans. It even sounded like Walmart’s “Every Day Low Prices.”

  The Guys must’ve told me a dozen times that the road trip to Iowa had been Hillary’s idea. “I’m hitting the road to earn your vote,” she’d said in the video and insisted they all hop in her pimped-out Scooby van for an incognito drive to Iowa. She always traveled with a portable radio so that she could listen to NPR—until well into the primary when her staff showed her how to listen on an iPhone. The road trip included a stop at the Chipotle in a Toledo suburb for the chicken burrito bowl heard round the world. Hillary acted as if the vacuous political press had somehow heard about the burrito bowl and rushed to cover it. In reality, Brown Loafers Guy, whose loafers and winning smile were making their way across the country alongside Hillary, tipped off a couple of reporters. This led to the leak of the grainy security-cam footage of Hillary and Huma behind dark glasses at the checkout line, Hillary carrying her own tray.

  As far as planned spontaneity went, the Chipotle stop was a coup. “Good spin on not being noticed,” Brown Loafers wrote about the news coverage. Pundits took the Chipotle stop as a sign we’d get an all-new Hillary Unbound. “We’ve never seen her get a burrito before,” Mark Halperin observed on Morning Joe.

  Hillary said she wanted to spend the early months of the campaign “getting the input of Everyday Americans.” She took a cue from her 2000 Senate campaign in New York when she’d embarked on a “listening tour,” sprinkling some first-lady stardust on upstate dairy farms and factory towns and bolstering her everywoman appeal.

  Indeed, by the time she first ran for president in 2008, Hillary was a hands-on senator constantly in touch with her upstate constituents. That was her frame of reference during the ’08 primary when the press all crammed into a living room in a prefab home in a predominantly white suburb in Indiana to see Hillary sit at the kitchen table and listen for over an hour to a proud Sheet Metal Workers Local 20 member who’d lost his job. Or when I heard her tell an unemployed waitress on the rope line in Columbus to personally follow up with her about her hysterectomy.

  But by her second campaign, Hillary had spent four years traveling the world, meeting with the likes of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon—a long way from Rochester. Hillary seemed like Rip van Winkle, awoken after a seven-year slumber to find a vastly different country. She’d missed the rise of the Tea Party. She’d missed the Occupy Wall Street movement and the rage over health care and bank bailouts and the 1 percent. She was shocked when she heard about the opioid epidemic ravaging rural communities. “This kind of snuck up on us,” she remarked in New Hampshire. And when she’d learned that people no longer wanted to be called middle class—a data point that seemed a fundamental shift in the American psyche and as clear a sign as any that there was something stirring this election year—Hillary and her consultants saw only a linguistic challenge.

  Perusing Hillary’s paid speeches to Wall Street banks, Mandy Grunwald expressed her biggest concern. “The remarks below make it sound like HRC DOESNT think the game is rigged—only that she recognizes that the public thinks so,” she said. “They are angry. She isn’t.”

  No one called those early 2015 appearances a listening tour—that would’ve given too much credit to Mark Penn, who came up with the idea ahead of the 2000 Senate race. The events were always meticulously produced, giving them the feel of a Chuck Lorre soundstage. Hillary took her seat in the middle of a horseshoe-shaped table, or those one-sided tables only used by TV families and the Last Supper, surrounded by seven or so voters all with prescreened stories to fit the day’s theme—mental health, the heroin epidemic, small businesses, affordable childcare, and so forth. The campaign instructed the Everyday Americans to call her “Hillary” rather than “Madam Secretary.”

  The backdrops included a packing plant outside Des Moines, where Hillary sat in front of neat boxes of fruits and vegetables labeled made in the usa. In Columbia, South Carolina, she folded her hands under her chin for a chat with minority business owners at Kiki’s Chicken and Waffles restaurant. Hillary would rattle off statistics she’d learned: “The average four-year graduate in Iowa graduates with nearly thirty thousand dollars in debt.” and “In New Hampshire, ninety-six percent of all businesses are considered small businesses.”

  There was a lot of note taking and little hugging. But Hillary loved to tell everyone how much she got out of these events. “I really like listening to people,” she’d say. “I learn a lot,” and “I like getting out and talking and figuring out what’s on people’s minds.” She’d call her policy team and pass on little notes she’d jotted down—like telling them to start using “opportunity system” to refer to higher education, a term Hillary learned on her stop at Kirkwood Community College. When Bryce Smith, a twenty-three-year-old bowling-alley owner, told Hillary in Norwalk, Iowa, that his biggest challenge in starting a small business was his $40,000 in student loan debt hurting his access to credit, she lit up: “I’ve never heard anyone so persuasively link the slowdown in business start-ups [with college debt].” Bryce got a handwritten thank-you note, and Hillary delivered on her promise to visit his bowling alley in Adel before the caucuses. (She did not bowl.)

  The roundtables were entirely overrun by Hillary’s staff and security detail and the press. It wasn’t unusual to have a couple hundred reporters fighting for credentials to hear Hillary talk to half a dozen Iowans about community banking. Swedish, German, Japanese journalists all sprinted through rural Iowa when they spotted Hillary’s van pulling up to a discussion about apprenticeship programs.

  By design, there was never enough space for the press. The pen-and-papers sat cross-legged or lay on our bellies on the concrete factory floors. Cameras filled the space, and sound and lighting guys dangled their boom mics and bright bulbs over the voters’ heads. This felt like a gross invasion at a children’s furniture factory in Keene, New Hampshire, when a middle-aged factory worker, Pamela Livengood, broke down about her daughter’s opioid addiction. “This little five-year-old lives with me, and I’m guardian,” she said. Hillary gave a knowing nod. “Pam, what you just told me and what I’m hearing from a lot of different people, there is a hidden epidemic.”

  When the talks wrapped up, Barb, the campaign photographer, would pose everyone for photos. Hillary gave voters the same pro tip every time: “If you can see the camera, the camera can see you!”

  That’s when the press would shout questions. These were mostly variations on “WHAT ABOUT YOUR EMAILS?” bellowed by cable news anchors. But not always. During a discussion on small businesses at a craft brewery in Hampton, New Hampshire, a reporter yelled, “DO YOU HAVE A PERCEPTION PROBLEM?” (“I’m gonna let the Americans decide that.”) After a talk about advanced manufacturing at a bike shop in Cedar Falls, Iowa, a correspondent for the Daily Mail yelled over and over as the half dozen or so Iowans sat dumbfounded, “SECRETARY CLINTON, WHAT MAKES YOU SO SPECIAL?” And again, the voice echoed over a question about community banking: “SECRETARY, WHAT MAKES YOU SO SPECIAL?” A BuzzFeed headline read Two Actual Everyday Americans Walk into a Hillary Clinton Event . . . And Get Crushed. The New York magazine columnist Frank Rich called the roundtables “worthy of a Christopher Guest parody.”

  14

  The Everydays

  He left behind a house in Mexico City that was neither poor nor rich, but thought itself better than both.

  —Sandra Cisneros

  Spring 2015

  It didn’t take long before the Hillary press corps turned Everydays into a proper noun. When we needed to get past the barricades to talk to voters, it was “C’mon, my editors need me to quote some Everydays.” Or when a line of women snaked around outside Hillary’s event at the Tri
dent Technical College in North Charleston, we’d ask the campaign, “What’s the crowd count on the Everydays who couldn’t get inside?” And when we had to identify the participants in one of Hillary’s bite-size talks about her plan for profit-sharing programs, we’d ask, “Do you have names and titles for the Everydays?” Even Brooklyn wasn’t immune. When Chelsea requested a private plane to fly to an event, Podesta shrugged, “She’s not an Everyday American.”

  But I never loved grammar more than in early May when we arrived at Rancho High School in North Las Vegas for a roundtable discussion on immigration. The plan was for Hillary to sit in the library, in front of stacks of books and guides to the Dewey decimal system, and listen sympathetically as high-achieving students told her they feared their parents would be deported. The campaign’s casting department had outdone itself. There was even a transgender daughter of undocumented immigrants.

  The night before, Annie Karni of Politico and I shared a mediocre platter of casino sushi. Bonding over our discovery that we went to the same exorbitant New York hair colorist (hers, chestnut and wispy around her face; mine, brown with honey-colored highlights that cost me a couple days’ pay), we vowed to motivate each other to exercise on the road. In 2008, the campaign-trail diet, combined with hours of sitting on a bus and my complete inability to get to a hotel gym, caused me to gain twenty pounds. To lose the weight before my impending wedding, I had to “enlist” in a boot camp taught by Iraq War vets. They made me sprint up stairs carrying car tires and yelled such motivational lines as “Old people fuck faster than you run, Chozick!” I swore to myself I’d be more disciplined this time.

  From that trip on, Annie surpassed the situational trail friends that any campaign reporter must make in order to endure the long hours on the road, and became an actual friend. We even spent time together when we had a rare day off the trail, drinking rosé on her Brooklyn rooftop with our very understanding husbands.

  That afternoon in Vegas, she gave me a ride to Rancho High School in her bright-yellow Mustang rental. We walked in to find a troop of students hanging up blue parchment paper several times taller than they were. When they’d neatly affixed the welcome sign with white masking tape, we noticed the red letters that spelled out Hillary’s campaign catchphrase, plus one glorious extraneous comma: everyday, americans need a champion, and i want to be that champion, hillary clinton.

  It wasn’t just fifteen-year-olds who could see the expression didn’t make any sense. Hillary knew it wasn’t working. “I know she has begun to hate everyday Americans,” Podesta informed the speechwriting team. But “if she doesn’t say it once, people will notice and say we false-started in Iowa.”

  She complained to aides that the poll-tested lines they kept handing her were duds. What, she wondered, does “I want to make the middle class mean something again” mean?

  But Hillary wasn’t sure what she wanted to say instead. So rather than casting the Everydays to the annals of history, alongside Bob Dole’s “A Leader for America” and John Kerry’s “Let America Be America Again,” Hillary kept saying it and saying it. At one point, Jimmy Kimmel asked if she was jealous of Bernie’s crisp “Feel the Bern” slogan “because I’ve seen some of yours, and they’re not as good.” Hillary brushed it off. “No, yeah, well, I’ve never been as good at slogans.” But it was never about the slogan; it was about Hillary’s inability to articulate why she wanted to be president. It was about Hillary, who’d been so in touch with struggling voters eight years earlier, not being able to see that Americans had to be pretty pissed off to no longer want to be called middle class.

  Hillary often called herself “a proud product of the American middle class” and “the daughter of a small businessman.” I heard her tell the story about her father’s drapery business so many times I could mouth the word “squeegee” at the exact second it came out of her mouth. “He went down with a silk-screen and dumped the paint in and took the squeegee and kept going,” she always said. (She couldn’t wait to drag that squeegee all over Trump. “I can only say that I’m certainly relieved that my late father never did business with you,” she preened in their first debate.)

  For the rest of the spring and into the summer, donors and prominent Democrats complained to the campaign about Everyday Americans, even, in one case, raising the similarities to the Walmart slogan. Hillary told aides she felt as if she were wearing a straightjacket. In order to win over Obama’s loyal voters, she needed to present herself as the center-left defender of his legacy. She said at almost every stop and particularly with black audiences, “I don’t think President Obama gets the credit he deserves . . .” But Hillary also knew enough about politics to know that every election, no matter how popular the incumbent, needed to be about change. This led Brooklyn to joke that she should just borrow the slogan from the fictional fumbling Vice President Selina Meyer in HBO’s Veep—who ran on a message of “Continuity with Change.” By August the campaign started to slowly phase out the Everydays. They tested eighty-four potential replacements:

  Theme: Fairness/Families

  A Fair Shot and a Fair Deal.

  Hillary—For Fairness. For Families.

  Building a Fairer Future Today.

  Fairness Worth the Fight.

  Fairness First.

  Putting Fairness First.

  A Fair Chance for Families.

  A Fair Fight for Families.

  You’ve Earned a Fair Shot.

  You’ve Earned a Fair Chance.

  A Fair Chance to Get Ahead.

  Families First.

  Building a Fairer Future.

  Fairness for All Our Families.

  Theme: Fighter

  Fighting for Fairness. Fighting for You.

  She’s Got Your Back.

  Your Family Is Her Fight.

  Your Family. Her Fight.

  Your Future Is Her Fight.

  Your Future. Her Fight.

  A Force for Families.

  No Quit.

  A Fighting Chance for Families.

  Theme: Basic Bargain/Making America Work

  Renewing America’s Promise.

  Renewing Our Basic Bargain.

  A New Promise for a New Time.

  A Better Bargain for a Better Tomorrow.

  Get Ahead. Stay Ahead.

  A Better Bargain. For All.

  An America That Works for You.

  An America Built for You.

  A New Bargain for a Stronger America.

  Time for a Better Bargain.

  Putting America to Work for You.

  Making America Work for You.

  A Promise You Can Count On.

  Theme: Strength

  Stronger Together.

  A Stronger Tomorrow.

  Strength and Fairness.

  Together We’re Strong.

  Strength You Can Count On.

  A Stronger America Working for You.

  The Ideas We Need and the Strength to Deliver.

  A Stronger America for a New Day.

  America’s Strength. America’s Promise.

  American Strength from American Families.

  Stronger at Home.

  For an America That Leads.

  America Gets Strong When You Get Ahead.

  A Stronger America One Family at a Time.

  Strength for All Our Families.

  Theme: Results/Count On

  Real Fairness; Real Solutions.

  New Solutions Real Results.

  A New Bargain We Can Count On.

  Progress for the Rest of Us.

  Theme: In It Together

  Progress for People.

  Progress for All.

  Getting Ahead Together.

  Making America Work. Together.

  Moving Ahead. Together.

  Theme: Future/Forward

  Your Future. Your Terms.

  Lifting Us Up. Moving Us Forward.

  Building Tomorrow’s America.

  Building a Better Tomorr
ow.

  Our Families, Our Future.

  Secure the Future.

  A Future Worth Fighting For.

  For Your Family. For America’s Future.

  Don’t Turn Back.

  Keep Moving.

  Move Up.

  Rise Up.

  Own the Future.

  Go Further.

  Move Ahead.

  Climb Higher.

  Unleash Opportunity.

  Theme: It’s About You

  It’s About You. It’s About Time.

  It’s About Time . . . And It’s About You.

  It’s About You.

  Because Your Time Is Now.

  It’s Your Turn.

  It’s Your Time.

  Next Begins with You.

  Brooklyn settled on “Fighting for Us,” “Breaking Down Barriers,” and “Building Ladders of Opportunity.” Hillary was lukewarm on “Fighting” and “Barriers” but she loved the “Ladders.” Months later, in the spin room after a Democratic debate, I performed the public service of telling her chief strategist Joel Benenson that the expression was a clunky garble of political talk. I could talk that way to Joel, a former New York reporter who had wisely cashed in but still liked to think of himself as a reporter. He loved to preface his regular ass whippings of reporters with “I understand, I used to be a reporter . . .” and he’d warn the campaign, “The press will love writing these. I did when I was a reporter.” One editor told me that Joel got into political consulting because the New York Times didn’t hire him. I laughed at this as I walked into Benenson’s Upper East Side apartment with its winding cylindrical staircase and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Joel was so confident in his status as an Obama campaign alum and Clinton outsider that he’d send notes around like “We need a paradigm shift in how this world operates,” referring to the “old Clinton MO.”