by Amy Chozick
At a Jennifer Lopez concert in Miami days before the election, Hillary burst onto the stage; gave J.Lo, in her lace-up kimono and thigh-high boots, a klutzy embrace; and exclaimed to the crowd, “Let’s get loud at the voting booth!”
The Travelers lived for these brief glimpses of Hillary’s wacky side, spending hours trying to anticipate her next election-related wordplay. The night she joined Jay Z and Beyoncé onstage in Cleveland? “Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation . . . and VOTE.” Or what about “I’ve got ninety-nine problems . . . and Hillary Clinton is going to fix EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.”
After the Wing Ding, I understood Hillary’s reflex to overthink every potential line that veered from the standard script. This, in turn, caused her already skittish aides to suck the life out of any attempt at unlitigated laughs. They fought over and rewrote jokes to the point of high parody until even the simplest punch line felt as heavy as a loaf of bread kneaded to an inch of its life by a dozen sets of overzealous hands.
The back-and-forth went something like this:
Ninny #1: I agree with Joel, let’s not go back to the emails . . . What about: “I used to be obsessed with Donald Trump’s hair, that was until I got to spend eleven hours staring at the top of Trey Gowdy’s head.”
Ninny #2: I love the joke, too. But I think HRC should stay above the [Benghazi] committee—and especially above personal insults about it. She’s got every inch of the high ground right now.
Ninny #3: Agree—tempting. But she shouldn’t go there tonight.
Ninny #4: Wow. You people are a bunch of ninnies.
Ninny #5: Not ninnies. We own the high ground right now. We should stay there.
Ninny #6: All that said . . . we really could use a little humor in here . . .
Ninny #7: Is there some Apprentice joke to make? I never saw the show. I’m also the worst person to generate jokes.
Ninny #8: You all think WJC’s joke is too much about her kinda wishing after hour eight that Bernie would come through the door with his damn emails line . . . ? I think it’s funny and confident and the room would love it.
Ninny #5: I think it gives Bernie the credit for putting the email crap behind us instead of her—she crushed the debate and she crushed at the committee.
Ninny #1: I defer if others think this buys us goodwill with Sanders people, but email jokes in Iowa usually end up badly and don’t we want to move on?
17
A Tale of Two Choppers
Once a traveler leaves his home, he loses almost 100 percent of his ability to control his environment.
—Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks, 4:28 a.m. from the Great Northern Hotel
Des Moines, August 2015
By the time I filed my story and a police report, had my car towed, got a replacement car brought from Minneapolis to Clear Lake, and drove to Des Moines after the Wing Ding, the Hilton Garden Inn had given away my room. The crush of visitors for the Iowa State Fair put my prepaid, preconfirmed suite in high demand, the late-night front-desk manager explained. He handed me a voucher for the Hotel Fort Des Moines.
“The Hotel Fort Des Moines? Isn’t that place condemned?”
“It’s going through some renovations,” he said.
The historic hotel, built in 1919, was taller than most buildings in downtown Des Moines, erected in a redbrick H shape and framed with creepy Gothic cornices. Back in 2008, in the tenth-floor presidential suite, Bill had an apoplectic fit as the caucus results rolled in. The Clintons stayed there because it’s a union hotel and they got to take over the entire penthouse floor, but it was a dump even then. There was no way Hillary or anyone who could cough up the $108 a night on the newly built Hampton Inn would choose to stay at the Fort Des Moines. Brown Loafers Guy—who had worked on the advance team that set up folding chairs and hung up American flags at Hillary’s Iowa town halls during the 2008 campaign—mimed dry heaving when I told him I spent the night there. But I was exhausted, and at that hour it was the Fort Des Moines or my car.
The tawny wood-lined lobby smelled of mothballs. The woman at the front desk warned me that the air conditioning was broken and all the windows were barred closed “on account of the renovation.” She handed me a plastic fan that I tucked under my arm, its cord dragging behind me. I carried my bucket to the ice machine down the smoky hallway only to find it was bone dry. I wet towels with cold water and slept naked on them.
The next morning, I took a cold shower and was out the door by seven to chase Hillary and Trump around the Iowa State Fair. The annual gathering draws one million visitors who descend on the fairgrounds for carnival rides, concerts, and the chance to talk to presidential candidates as they eat deep-fried nachos and cheese curds and seventy-five different varieties of foods impaled on a stick. The wrong culinary move can spell calamity.
In 2003, not long after John Kerry, already seen as effete, had asked for Swiss on his Philly cheesesteak instead of the usual Cheez Whiz topping, his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, spotted Kerry ordering a strawberry smoothie. He sent an all-staff email out to the campaign: “SOMEBODY GET A FUCKING CORN DOG IN HIS HAND NOW.”
Hillary wore a gingham blouse and stood in front of a couple of slobbery brown cows to take questions from the press. This included several “WHAT ABOUT YOUR EMAILS?” questions (“It’s not anything people talk to me about as I travel around the country,” she said) and multiple inquiries about whether Tom Harkin, the lovable liberal titan who didn’t endorse in 2008, had endorsed Hillary six months before the caucuses to scare off Biden. “My support for Hillary for president has nothing to do with other people,” he said, following Brooklyn’s instructions not to utter the veep’s name.
But we knew the answer. Everything Brooklyn did the entire month of August and into September was designed to squeeze out Biden.
The press was mostly huddled under shade trees, many of us still smelling like the men’s locker room at a 24 Hour Fitness. But Hillary stood fully exposed under the beating sun and didn’t even glisten. It was one of her many gifts—she never sweat. I asked a close aide about this once who told me Hillary had built up a tolerance over all those years of accompanying Bill to outdoor events in Arkansas. Arkansas got hot, Texas hot, but there was no way going to the Mount Nebo Chicken Fry, the Smackover Oil Town Festival, and the Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival somehow bestowed on the governor’s wife the supernatural ability not to perspire—three decades later—in August in the Midwestern humidity.
I ran all this by a Times colleague’s partner, who is a dermatologist. He had another theory. “Botox,” he said. “You get injections into your glands and just like that, no more sweat.”
Under all the niceties, Iowans can be a smug, demanding bunch. They wanted Hillary to show them she could do the glad-handing, retail politicking she’d failed to do in 2008. She barreled through the fairgrounds accompanied by her usual Blob—a slow-moving, cumbersome cluster of campaign staff, Secret Service agents wearing bodyguard-casual polo shirts, at least one senator, a former governor, several prominent donors with questionable income streams, and her entire traveling press corps, at least fifty of us. “I’m just having a good time!” Hillary said.
“What did she say? We couldn’t hear a word!” yelled a woman wearing an h button.
I tried to get ahead of the Blob, skipping in front of Hillary and her entourage as she made her way through the agriculture building, past the prize-winning yellow-hybrid popcorn and the display of onions and the life-size cow made entirely of butter. As she wove through the predetermined route that aides and security had mapped out for her, Hillary posed for forty-five pictures, raved about being a grandmother (“It’s the best!”), examined a Monopoly-themed sculpture also made of butter (“I love it!”), asked if Iowa had any zoning programs to help out small farmers (it does), and gave an evasive “Sounds good!” to a fairgoer who asked if she would attend a tailgate party sponsored by the Iowa Corn Growers Association. I was pretending to peruse a walk-through display on ge
netically engineered corn when the Blob made its way inside.
I ran right into Huma, who looked like she’d gotten lost in the Barneys shoe department. “Oh look, there’s Amy,” she said with her usual enthusiasm.
“Oh, hi!” Hillary said, and then turned to the corn growers. She nodded. “A lot of Americans don’t appreciate how innovative and forward-looking this country’s farmers are.”
After ordering the requisite pork chop on a stick and taking a couple of bites, Hillary climbed into the back seat of a black SUV, leaving Iowans and the Blob behind, to fly on a private plane to Martha’s Vineyard for Vernon Jordan’s eightieth birthday party.
Def Leppard was performing at the fair that night, and I passed a couple fairgoers humming the grainy guitar solo of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” as I strained to see Trump’s helicopter and a 1,235-pound pumpkin in the distance. The helicopter said everything about the double standard Hillary would face in 2016.
Back in 2007, the landing skids of the Bell 222 had hardly touched down on her ninety-nine-county, five-day blitz on the Hill-A-Copter before the press said Hillary’s chartered chopper was the ultimate symbol of her inept campaign and her own out-of-touch elitism. “A pickup truck might have been a little more effective,” snipped David Nagle, a former Democratic congressman and Cedar Falls attorney. Hillary Clinton Couldn’t Buy Iowans’ Love, a Washington Post headline read. I used the Hill-A-Copter in my stories, too, saying Iowans had “cringed at the loud landing of the Hill-A-Copter, which cost several thousand dollars a day in a state where voters prefer their candidates in Greyhounds.”
There is a photo of us from that December morning in 2007. We are in Elkader about to step onto the red carpet laid out across the ice-covered tarmac to board the Hill-A-Copter for the inaugural one-and-a-half-hour flight to Waterloo. I can still see Hillary step out of her van with her hands in her pockets. I introduce myself and tell her I’ll be covering her campaign, that we first met ten years earlier when she was in San Antonio. She pretends to remember. Hillary is wearing her black shearling-lined leather coat, the one that screams 1993 but that she’ll never get rid of. I am just back from Tokyo and my hair is still a chemically streaked mass of bleached waves. I am carrying a reporter’s notebook and a brown leather satchel that I splurged on before I left for Iowa because even though it is heavy and digging into my shoulder, it looks like something a campaign reporter would carry. My hair is spread all over her shoulder like some yellow sea creature’s tentacles. We are so cold that she has dropped the politician look. She could be an aunt or one of my mother’s friends. Cynthia McFadden, the ABC News anchor, yells from a distance, “What prepared you for this, Senator?” Hillary replies, “I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a little girl.” That’s when Outsider Guy, who, years later, would tell me that no one took me seriously, snaps the picture. Hillary and I are pulled in close, shoulder to shoulder, without a hint of bitterness between us. Now when I look at the photo, I realize that damn chopper hulking behind our warmest moment was an omen.
I couldn’t get over how, seven years later, when Trump gave about fifty kids rides on his customized Sikorsky S-76B at the Iowa State Fair, the political class marveled at the helicopter as evidence of his marketing genius. The Trump Copter became indicative of his connection to the people. He was the Everyman’s (or the Everyday’s) billionaire. He told one little boy, “I am Batman”—a comment we all found hilarious before realizing we were living in The Dark Knight. One of six CNN stories about the chopper rides read Donald Trump’s Helicopter Provides a Thrill for Children at the Iowa State Fair. The Bloomberg Politics headline read Mark Halperin Rides in Style with “The Donald.” ABC News’ Martha Raddatz also hopped on board. “The kids love it,” Trump said over the engine’s hum.
It wasn’t only that a candidate had to have a penis to pull off the helicopter stunt—though that helped. It was something else, something about Trump and the press and how amusing we found all of it.
Trump stepped off a golf cart in a dark-blue blazer, his make america great again hat splitting the masses like the Red Sea. He’d hardly taken a step before Hillary was a distant afterthought. Trump’s slow-moving cluster of press, security, and fans (I couldn’t even call them supporters, not yet) holding their phones overhead, reaching out hundred-dollar bills for him to sign, dwarfed Hillary’s Blob. The same Iowans whom I’d seen trying to get a shot of Hillary’s blonde bob in the agriculture building now angled to get close to Trump amid shouts of “Kick Hillary’s ASS!” and “Trump that bitch!”
I made an educated guess that Trump would also head for the pork chop truck and got in line, sucking in the scent of exhaust and cooking oil. I stood in line with a trio of college girls, all blondes in wind shorts that stuck to their tanned thighs. None of them were for Hillary. “I don’t trust anything she says,” one of the girls told me. Two of them had already decided to vote for Trump.
I could feel my forehead scrunching, my inner Valley Girl voice come out, “Seriously?” I thought for sure these girls were fucking with me or fucking with the democratic process or both.
“Yeah, I don’t like everything he says, but at least he says it like it is,” one of the girls said.
By the time I got back to the Hotel Fort Des Moines, it was dark outside though the humidity hadn’t let up. I took the rickety elevator with its this way up sign to the eighth floor. The door on room 817 was ajar. The smell of cigarette smoke and reefer floated through the open crack. Thinking I had the wrong room, I checked my key. Yep, room 817. I slowly pushed the door open to find a scene that looked like a meth den. Two men and one woman spread out on one of the double beds sucking down cigarettes. The mattress on the other bed had been dragged to the floor, and two more men, both in undershirts, reclined on it, their eyes little slits. I noticed a luggage rack had been rolled in with a red ice chest full of Busch Light.
One of the men on the bed, skinny with a shaved head and a snake tattoo that peeked out from his collar, took a long drag and looked me up and down.
“Can we help you?”
“Um, yeah, I think this is my room.” I flashed my key as if it were a badge.
“It’s our room now.”
I didn’t want to escalate matters. I’d watched enough Lockup: Raw marathons to know he’d likely graduated from a cell at the Iowa State Penitentiary to my room at the Hotel Fort Des Moines. But for the past four months, I’d squeezed everything I needed in life into a single black roller bag (carry-on size because who has time to wait for checked baggage?). I didn’t see it. I’d already lost one of the diamond stud earrings Bobby had had specially made in the jewelry district and given me for our first wedding anniversary—gone forever in the sheets of a Best Western at the Manchester airport or sucked into the vacuum at the Avis return.
“Okay, well can I just get my luggage?” I asked.
“Haven’t seen your luggage,” the same man, the spokesman of the group, said.
“All right, well thanks anyway. I’ll just check with the front desk. Enjoy your evening!” I surprised myself with how chipper this came out.
Downstairs, I banged on the bronze bell at the front desk. A petite woman with a flash of pink in her hair came out looking as if I’d woken her.
“Hi. Oh, thank God. There are people in my room and my luggage is gone and my phone died and I need to call the police and—”
She interrupted me, rubbing her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Room 817?”
“Yes. That’s my room.”
“Oh yeah, the Hilton only gave you one night, so I moved you out and said my friends could have the room. Let me get you your stuff.” She was so polite, as if she’d given my room away to a Make-A-Wish kid, not a pile of tweakers. She turned around and came out a couple of minutes later with my roller bag.
I flung it on the floor and unzipped it. Passport, clothes, makeup, Kiehl’s travel-size skin products, chargers, battery packs, backup battery packs, leather-bound journal, necklace my mom gave m
e before the campaign started with the bronze key that says brave, ziplock bags full of almonds and melatonin—all thrown about, pulled from their neat pockets, but all there.
18
Sorry, Not Sorry
North Las Vegas, August 2015
“Isn’t leadership about taking responsibility?” Fox News’ Ed Henry yelled with the grace of a livestock auctioneer.
It was August in North Las Vegas, and the thermometer in Annie Karni’s rental car read 129 degrees. Hillary wore silky pants, a blouse, and pointy-toed shoes all in exactly the same apricot hue. She’d finished a town hall that hadn’t gone well—nothing had gone particularly well, really, since the Wing Ding. When an ebullient supporter asked if she could get a hug, Hillary told the woman, “Sit down right there. When I finish my Q&A, I will give you that hug, I promise.” We didn’t see if she delivered said hug, but after the town hall, Hillary strolled to the back of the gym to take our questions.
“Look, Ed, I do take responsibility,” she said. “I regret this has become such a cause célèbre, but that doesn’t change the facts.”
“Did you try to wipe the whole server?” Ed called out.
“I don’t. I have no idea, that’s why we turned it over.”
“You were the official in charge of it. Did you wipe the server?”
“What? Like, with a cloth or something?” Hillary said, rubbing the air as if she were applying Windex to an invisible window.
When she stormed off leaving a glass of hardly touched iced tea behind, an NBC News reporter yelled out, “Isn’t this an indication that this issue isn’t going to go away for the remainder of your campaign?” She threw a dismissive wave at us and said, as she walked out an exit door and into the Las Vegas heat, “Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys.”
