Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  The travel came at a cost. I was lonely. I missed my work wife, Michael Barbaro, and his daily commentary on my wardrobe (“I would just maybe wrap the scarf this way . . .”). It was like a tree falling in the forest—was it even a cute outfit if Michael didn’t see it?

  New York magazine had deemed Michael—with his round-framed glasses, salt-and-pepper curls, and a goatee so groomed that its mustache and slender chin line practically formed a Timesian T split up the center of his cylindrical face—a member of the Times’ “Gay Mafia” of political reporters. He had a Yale degree, an Upper West Side co-op apartment, and he took wide, confident strides around the newsroom, all of which camouflaged that he had as big a chip on his shoulder as the rest of us. When I first met Michael, I only saw his posh exterior. But by the time we occupied adjacent cubicles in the politics pod, gossiping and cracking that’s-what-she-said jokes all day over our shared partition, I knew him as the son of a New Haven firefighter who had scrapped to get his foot in the door. In addition to fashion critiques, Michael became an invaluable resource as I tried to keep up with interoffice gossip while on the road.

  I did everything I could to both travel and deliver stories. I wanted to think that at heart I was still a foreign correspondent, whether it was a coffee shop in Cedar Rapids or a factory in Shenzhen. But in the era of live streaming and Twitter and a candidate who hardly acknowledged us and almost never broke script, my editors often didn’t see the point. I was about to take my seat on a JetBlue flight back to New York from Orlando when one editor said, “I worry you’ll be in the air and we need this for the front . . .” I ran upstream, pushed past passengers as they loaded their carry-ons overhead, and demanded that the flight attendant let me off the plane before takeoff.

  “You know you can’t reboard?” she said.

  “Yeah, got it,” I said.

  I then sat on the floor of the Orlando airport near a power outlet to write the story while industrial carpet cleaners passed by. I ate a stale Starbucks bistro box and checked into the Hampton Inn. The next morning, I got the first flight back to New York and bought the paper with my A1 byline.

  Adding to my urge to travel, I knew that even as Hillary ignored me, it pissed her off when I skipped her events. After I’d taken a couple of weeks off the trail, I ran into Huma at the annual Blue Jamboree fund-raiser in North Charleston, South Carolina. I said hello as she stood under trees dripping with Spanish moss. “Oh, Amy,” she said behind her dark cat-eye sunglasses. “Are you still covering this campaign?”

  Just as my stint in Tokyo had, my months traveling the country started to create a schism between my new life on the road and my old one back in New York. I began to feel more at home among strangers in the TSA Pre line than with Midtown office workers shouting out their coffee orders. On days when Politico scooped me or Twitter directed its ire my way—in other words, most days—I took comfort in knowing that no one lined up at the Cinnabon at O’Hare cared what was happening in my little world.

  I’d find myself at a rare Sunday brunch back in New York cringing at the conversations I’d overhear, about summer shares on Fire Island and gallery openings and seeing Hamilton for the second time “with the new cast,” things I would’ve talked about, too, in my old life. But that was before I spent most of my days talking to people in the middle of the country who couldn’t afford health care or lost their jobs when the factory closed or took out a second mortgage to pay their kid’s college tuition. Everything back in New York started to seem so petty.

  And each time my editors summoned me back to New York, after a couple of days making calls and watching the election unfold via Twitter and CNN, I would plead to go back out.

  This election isn’t happening in my cubicle.

  Pat Healy, who in addition to Anne Kornblut was the only other person who understood what it was like to have your personal life and psychological well-being upended by Hillary and her cadre of adoring men, had also been in Des Moines for weeks. For years OG, echoed by his minions, had told me Pat wouldn’t hesitate to take me out. The opposite happened. Pat’s arrival on the politics team made me feel as though the target on my back had faded, or at least been covered up under so many layers of fleece and down that I didn’t walk around with it like a scarlet a anymore. Pat was the most fair-minded reporter I knew. If The Guys had tried to take him out, too, then maybe David Carr had been right and it wasn’t me.

  Pat and I both arrived in Iowa several weeks before the caucuses. He missed his boyfriend, Ray, and I missed Bobby. We made a pact to comfort each other with daily over-the-top, mildly sexual compliments. “You look so hot in that down vest,” he said when I climbed into the booth across from him after three hours of sleep and reached for the bottomless coffee. Pat wore sweatpants and a white undershirt. He is objectively hunky, with fervid blue eyes, a head of black waves, and a few days of stubble.

  “Have you been working out? Your chest looks ripped,” I said. And then we’d giggle and carbo-load on Lender’s bagels and cheese Danish at the buffet at the Rock River Grill & Tavern inside the Marriott because we never knew when our next meal would come.

  Then, in the final week before the caucuses, the person I’d been in New York and the person I was becoming on the road, two sides of myself that no longer seemed to fit, collided. Carolyn, a half dozen editors, a handful of support staff, and at least twenty political reporters all descended on Des Moines.

  They seemed so out of context in Iowa, so blatantly not of the place, like when my parents visited from Texas and I took them for avocado toast on the Lower East Side.

  “Hey! Welcome to Iowa. Wow, everyone is here . . .” I said as I burst into the Waterloo to greet my colleagues. I quickly realized that Midwestern friendly didn’t quite fit the vibe.

  A couple of people mumbled “hi” without looking up from their screens. A social media editor gnawed on her fingernails. The web producer next to me quivered his right leg so wildly that I felt the folding table vibrate.

  Descriptions of our proposed stories were splayed on a whiteboard, and I watched Carolyn stand up and with the flick of her wrist kill several slugs. By then, the 2016 story was moving so fast that the features and analysis pieces we’d proposed, or that editors had ordered up, could by the end of a day’s news cycle already become stale. My heart ached as I watched unionjeb, followed by berniekids and demsfracture, swept from the annals of history with a single eraser swoop.

  The Waterloo had the silent, harried feel of the final minutes of the SAT had the test been administered in a Siberian labor camp. “What the fuck?” I mouthed to a colleague who only shook his head and drooped his eyes back down to his keyboard. “Mommy and Daddy aren’t speaking right now,” he G-chatted me, which was what we said when Carolyn and her top deputy stewed after a heated debate.

  The arrival of the Times in Des Moines signified more than my own reining in. The race had finally become real. For the first time, people would vote or caucus (whatever that means) and the story we’d spent the past couple of years preparing to cover would take on its own wild, unpredictable life.

  This led to our descent from steady and manageable low-grade hysteria to such high-grade hysteria that when Hillary said we need a more open conversation about mental health care, my first thought went to the Times’ politics team. My editors implemented a 7:45 a.m. ET daily conference call during which, in a hungover haze, we’d all try to one-up each other with our Definitive Hot Takes. “Cruz has sealed up the evangelicals . . .” and “Hillary’s gonna hit Bernie on foreign policy today . . .” and “Trump’s debate scam won’t work.” Carolyn, aside from a couple of grunts and “Okay, who’s next?” hardly ever reacted. That made us all even more hungry.

  I hadn’t seen Bobby in weeks. In Japan, we’d always made time to talk, but on the trail, I hardly had time to call to say goodnight. He’d booked a flight to come visit that weekend. He’d heard so much about Iowa and wanted to see it for himself in all its flat, bland American glory. I ado
red that Bobby wanted to experience “life on the trail,” as he called it.

  There would’ve been no trail for me without him encouraging me to stick with it, and he somehow didn’t hate the road for keeping us apart. He met up with me whenever he could. With Bobby there, even the simplest trail activity, heating up Hot Pockets in the lobby of a Hilton Garden Inn in Manchester, became an adventure.

  “Life on the trail babes . . .” he’d say, pulling down the floral duvet and spreading a picnic of junk food out on the sheets of one of the room’s double beds.

  In 2008, I had even snuck Bobby into a primary debate. He held my reporter’s notebook and told the organizers in his thickest Irish accent that he was with Horse & Hound magazine.

  He’d already planned to drive to Iowa City and visit a science center in Des Moines so that I could work. But sensing Carolyn’s stress level, I worried she and my other editors would see Bobby in the hallways at the Marriott and frown on my trying to squeeze in personal life a week before the caucuses. I told him to cancel. The line went quiet. I sensed his tolerance for my travels, my selfishness, my always putting Hillary and my job before everything else, wearing thin.

  “It’s too late to get a refund,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in almost a month.”

  “I know, and I’m dying to see you, but I just can’t right now. I’ll pay you back for the flight,” I said, an empty promise since our money all came from the same place. We hung up further apart than we’d been in years.

  I was pretty focused and stoic about another week without Bobby until my Glow app sent me the super-helpful pastel-purple alert, “Your fertile window is closing . . .”

  This led to my sobbing to Maggie Haberman over a chardonnay in the hotel lobby. She looked up from Twitter, over her glasses. “Okay, you need to take that app off your phone immediately,” Mags said.

  24

  The Girls on the Bus

  Iowa, 2016

  “To our traveling press corps—Happy New Year!” the email read. “For your safety and convenience we will be providing a bus that will begin in Davenport and transport press throughout the swing.”

  I had an excuse not to work from the Waterloo. We’d finally gotten our press bus—a glorious maroon Signature premium people carrier with TVs over every third row and boxed lunches and bottled water piled up on the front couple of rows and power outlets under all our seats.

  For the Travelers, the arrival of the bus—parked in all her pack-journalism splendor on the frozen Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds in Davenport—signified more than an end to speeding tickets and Avis points. We’d finally moved into our very own communal home, like a loft apartment on MTV’s Real World but with wheels. In the outside world, most of us wouldn’t have chosen to spend our time together and certainly not that much time together. But in our shared caravan, we were the Travelers. The bus marked the beginning of us becoming a rowdy, high-strung family forever bound by our bizarre lifestyles, unhealthy diets, and constant search for a power outlet.

  The nine or so of us on that first bus trip wanted to mark the moment. We stood on our seats and squatted in the aisle to fit into a group photo. “Say ‘I’m With Her!’” a young campaign staffer said. “Can you just take the picture?” one of the Wires said.

  Like all candidate reporters, I’d devoured Timothy Crouse and Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Ben Cramer and David Foster Wallace’s Up, Simba! (plus glossary), romanticizing the campaign bus beyond all reason. I imagined Great Men, the “heavies” as Crouse called the top rung on the hierarchy of traveling press, Johnny Apple (NYT), David Broder (WashPost), and Bob Novak (Chicago Sun-Times), driving public opinion in between drinking sessions. Their prose had the power to sway primaries and make other Great Men into presidents or tear them down until they were also-rans confined to a historical footnote (see Muskie, Edmund). The job had a poetic, renegade feel. Men left their wives and families and their comfortable homes in the suburbs to sleep in a different hotel every night. All in the service of Democracy and dick swinging. Add to the political clout free-flowing booze and summer-camp camaraderie between reporters who spent our days together in buses and our nights at the hotel bar on an expense account, and well, it was hard to believe that anyone got paid to have that much fun.

  That’s not to say I felt like much of a journalist on the campaign trail. Writing an entire story on deadline on your lap from a swerving press van in a motorcade while trying not to spill what’s left of a four-hour-old venti cold brew does require a certain skill set, but it never felt quite like journalism. Even in ’72, the reporters assigned to travel everywhere a candidate went didn’t exhibit much intrepidness. The Travelers knew the candidate and the campaign better than anyone, but we also had to grudgingly accept that we existed mostly for protective purposes, “in case something happened.”

  The ’08 campaign had hardly been a media lovefest. The Travelers had been so pissed at Hillary for ignoring us at one point that when she made a one-minute-twenty-eight-second visit to the press bus offering bagels and coffee (“I didn’t want you to feel deprived”) no one partook. Reporters actually turned down food. That was how bad it was.

  Hillary had to apologize after one of the ’08 Guys nearly blew a gasket on us before the press bus even pulled out from the Marriott. “You know, he’s not the person I would have put in charge,” she said. Another ’08 Guy told the bus driver to speed up when he spotted ABC News’ Kate Snow sprinting through the parking lot of a Hy-Vee in Des Moines after she’d lingered too long at a meet and greet with Bill, Hillary, and Magic Johnson. The campaign once put the traveling press file in a men’s locker room, where I wrote my story while sitting between Tina Brown, the glamorous former Vanity Fair editor, and a urinal. (“These accommodations should in no way be taken as a comment on the quality of our media coverage,” the ’08 Guys said.)

  But at least back then the “traveling press secretary” actually traveled with the press. This didn’t seem like a radical concept until 2016 when on most days not a single person authorized to speak for the campaign ever traveled with the press. Proximity was power in 2016. They preferred instead to ride alongside Hillary in the motorcade or on her private chartered plane.

  On one swing, when there was no room on the charter between Iowa City and Ottumwa, Brown Loafers sat on the plane’s turned-down toilet seat for the half-hour flight rather than ride in our putrid press quarters. On a typical day, we’d spend eighteen hours on the bus only to set eyes on Hillary from the back of a packed gymnasium or as a flash of blonde disappearing behind a van door held open by a bulky Secret Service agent.

  I think it was Cheryl Mills who said that “by the time women and minorities reach the presidency, the role has been vastly diminished.” Well, call it a slap from the patriarchy or a stroke of bad luck, but by the time women reporters dominated Hillary’s press corps, Twitter and live streaming and a (female) candidate who had zero interest in having a relationship with the press vastly diminished the campaign bus’s place in the media ecosystem.

  My colleagues could cover a speech or a press conference (on the rare occasion those happened) while watching the live stream from New York where they’d have Wi-Fi and power and wouldn’t have to worry about waiting in line at a porta-potty on deadline or some fresh-faced campaign staffer yelling “LOADING!” right when you’re crafting the perfect nut graph.

  The traveling press had become the province of what one prickly print reporter (on his way to a buyout) called “the Human Tripods,” the young network embeds who’d never covered a campaign before and who had to capture everything the candidate did on video. As long as the Tripods delivered a live stream, the print reporters could do our jobs and the ecosystem worked. The Times and the Post and the AP and Politico still broke news and provided TV talking heads with something to gab about. But in our little leper colony on wheels, the masters of Snapchat and Vine and Twitter and Periscope had become the new “heavies.”

  “He practically goes
around with a T-shirt saying ‘I work for the Times: I’m Number One!’” That was how one politico described the Times’ Johnny Apple to Crouse during the ’72 campaign. I approached our inaugural bus outing, a two-day swing to Davenport, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Osage, Sioux City, and Council Bluffs, ready to project a similar haughtiness. I even wore a synthetic wool hat that I’d bought at the company holiday sale, with a stretched the new york times in white embroidery across my forehead and that almost everyone made relentless fun of. I work for the Times: I’m Number One!

  My sense of superiority lasted about two hours and thirty-five minutes. That’s when I found myself somewhere on I-80 perched over the back of my seat pleading with the embeds to let me watch their video feed of Hillary’s town hall. Because Hillary preferred to fly to her events (and really, who wouldn’t?) the bus-bound Travelers couldn’t make it to the Cedar Rapids and Osage stops. Our only option was to live-stream Hillary’s Iowa events from the press bus in Iowa.

  Then, through a muffled intercom, the driver, whose name tag read chuck, west des moines, ia, apologized. All I heard was, “So sorry folks . . . gotta . . . generator . . . break . . .” The power and the Wi-Fi went out. We could live without Krispy Kreme donut holes and Chips Ahoy! snack packs. We could even hold our noses over the toilet that had several counties back run out of antibacterial hand foam. But the prospect of losing Wi-Fi as Hillary carried on without us in Cedar Rapids pushed the Travelers over the edge. How would we explain to our editors that we’d allowed ourselves to be sequestered hundreds of miles from the candidate we were supposed to babysit? I imagined something terrible happening—a terrorist attack or an assassination attempt. My editors would pull me off the trail forever. I could hear the scorn: “You had ONE FUCKING JOB!”