Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  That’s when the world’s most influential print publications—the Times, the Post, the Journal, Politico, the AP, Bloomberg, and Reuters—banded together and did the one thing we still felt empowered to do. We whined . . .

  “She could’ve been shot!”

  “Yeah, or dropped dead of a heart attack.”

  “Seriously, guys, what if something happened to her and we weren’t there?”

  “The bus fucking sucks.”

  “I HATE the bus . . .”

  “Sorry, Chuck.”

  “How much longer?”

  The days continued like that . . .

  1/23: Davenport → Clinton → Davenport

  1/24: Davenport → Marion → North Liberty → West Des Moines → Davenport

  1/25: Des Moines → Waukee → Knoxville → Oskaloosa → Des Moines

  . . . until the campaign had become one endless bus ride through frozen cornfields.

  My whole body and my journalism atrophied on the bus. On most days, I’d make at least a dozen calls to sources, but on the bus I hardly made any phone calls or talked to anyone outside my fellow Travelers. I no longer had the energy to yell at my editors when Pat Healy or Jonathan Martin got to write the daily A1 stories. I lost my will to protest when editors only wanted me to send color and quotes that would be melded (or not) into the roundup Frankenstory, what we called the editor-assembled daily news stories with multiple bylines and several contributor lines at the bottom. I didn’t even complain when the Travelers had to convene in the lobby of the Marriott at 7:00 a.m. only to drive to the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines and sit on our bus outside as Hillary answered questions about Israel. The campaign said the space was too tight to accommodate her largely Semitic traveling press corps. During the event, Hillary had a mild coughing attack, or at least it looked as though she’d had a mild coughing attack from the live feed that I watched on my phone while standing in the parking lot puffing on an e-cigarette. I hadn’t smoked since high school, but at thirty-seven it seemed like as good a time as any to develop a nicotine addiction.

  The Subway sandwich situation had become so dire that I gave some poor freelancer a lecture about bus etiquette after he’d grabbed two turkey sandwiches, leaving me to eat the shredded lettuce, pickles, and tomatoes off a foot long that I’m pretty sure had fallen on the floor.

  We started to hoard food. I once filled a Hefty garbage bag with hard-boiled eggs, hummus packs, and fruit trays from an Au Bon Pain in Indianola and slung it over my shoulder hobo-style as we trooped on and off the bus. Irina, the Vogue writer, who was Russian, watched me do this and asked if I’d ever been an orphan in the Soviet Union.

  We reverted to tweens. The bus almost abandoned us in Vinton (pop. 5,257) after we couldn’t pull ourselves away from The Fast and the Furious arcade game at the roller-skating rink where Hillary spoke. She declared, “The entire country, indeed the entire world is watching to see what happens right here in Benton County . . .” The entire world except the members of her traveling press, who were in the adjacent room locked in a heated game of Ms. Pac-Man. We established cliques, banishing newcomers to the Landfill. We started our periods at the same time and sang Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself” on a loop.

  While our counterparts on the Bernie Bus exuded the unexpected cockiness of covering a budding insurgency, the Hillary press mimicked the morose march of our assigned campaign. Jason Horowitz, who’d also been in Hillary’s 2008 traveling press when he was with the New York Observer and who had his own scare trying to get to a John Edwards rally (Horowitz Taxi Hits Turkey, Both Lose, the Observer headline read), was now with the Times and assigned to the Bernie Bus. Jason knew my obsession with Midnight Cowboy and started calling me Rico, the character who dies in the film’s final scene, his head resting on the window of the back seat of a bus. “Rico? Rico? Hey, Rico,” Jason texted me, imitating Jon Voight’s Joe Buck as he tried to shake Dustin Hoffman awake.

  Bernie packed an auditorium in Decorah, telling the twenty-three hundred people, “Today, the inevitable candidate doesn’t look quite so inevitable.” Hillary, meanwhile, spoke to 450 in the city’s Hotel Winneshiek ballroom, where the crowd of mostly the over-sixty-five set wore red T-shirts with the fighting words does your candidate HAVE a plan for social security? In Sioux City, Bernie filled the Orpheum Theatre.

  Days earlier when Hillary, paranoid about comparisons to Bernie’s crowd sizes, went to Sioux City, she held a “Fighting for Us” town hall at the Orpheum Theatre. Not in the theater auditorium itself, but in its ornate foyer. Supporters squeezed onto the stairs and hung over gold-leafed balconies festooned with American flags. Afterward, campaign aides bragged that a crowd stretched around the block (“at least a couple hundred people”) who wanted to see Hillary but couldn’t fit inside. “Shit,” I thought. “If only there’d been a larger venue, like a theater, nearby . . .”

  Hillary’s Iowa town halls became so frequent and intimate that they started to take on the familiar, if laborious, feel of catching up with an old girlfriend who cites GDP statistics over brunch.

  On a Saturday afternoon, in Clinton in eastern Iowa (motto: “So many things to do—With a river view!”), Hillary cracked herself up when she told the small crowd at Eagle Heights Elementary, “You didn’t have to name it [Clinton]. I would’ve come anyway!”

  Her brow grew deliberate. “I got to tell you, I did a little research and Clinton County is named for DeWitt Clinton, the sixth governor of New York, and what is so interesting, because I admire DeWitt Clinton, he was the person who said, ‘We’re going to build a canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, all the way across New York to open up the West to commerce . . .’”

  It didn’t matter to Hillary that by this point the crowd had started to fidget and look down at their phones. Or that most of the press, sensing a prolonged history lesson, had stood up from our row of seats at the back of the auditorium and moved to a nearby room set up with bottled water and bags of chips.

  “He started when he was mayor of New York City just pushing, pushing, pushing, as hard as he could, and finally on the Fourth of July 1817 they broke ground. It took eight years. He was elected governor. He worked really hard, then he ran into some political headwinds, I know a little about that. [Some laughs.] He was voted out and then he came back. I know a little about that, too. [Some more laughs.] And then in 1825 after those eight years, the Erie Canal was opened up . . .”

  Of course. Hillary was DeWitt Clinton. She had the perseverance and the political headwinds and the $275 billion infrastructure plan. What did Bernie have? She had so much fun telling this story that I figured we’d driven the three hours from Des Moines to Clinton that morning only so she could riff on DeWitt (“no relation”). “I think it’s pretty interesting that the folks who settled here named this part of Iowa for DeWitt Clinton,” she said, in conclusion. “They understood that he was a leader who set big goals and then he worked. He did the politics.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure how DeWitt’s big goals squared with Hillary’s other campaign promise at the time, which was that she wouldn’t overpromise. “I would rather underpromise and overdeliver,” she told 460 people at the Five Flags Center in Dubuque.

  The underpromise line made Brooklyn cringe. It didn’t take a room full of pollsters to know that American voters preferred to elect charismatic men who wildly overpromise. But Hillary didn’t want to be like them. She was a realist, or as I called it, a radical incrementalist. She’d tried to tell voters in ’08 that Obama couldn’t deliver on the “Hope” and “Change” he was selling. “Now, I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified, the sky will open up, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect,’” she’d told a crowd in Providence, Rhode Island, during her primary fight against Obama. Eight years later, Hillary privately blamed the country’s anger in no small part on Obama�
��s inability to deliver. So for a while, before her aides pried the underpromise line off her lips, Hillary would tell Iowans, “I don’t want to overpromise. We don’t need any more of that.”

  You had to give it to Hillary for being back in Iowa at all. It had to be agonizing to get up every day and try to win over the voters who had handed her a mortifying third-place finish in 2008. For years pollsters warned her, “They just don’t like you in Iowa,” but had she skipped the caucuses, we all would’ve written stories calling her entitled, an imperial candidate, running scared from the liberal base. She wasn’t going to let that happen.

  Hillary tried out comedic shticks and did impersonations that I almost never saw her do outside Iowa. She’d get to the part of her stump speech about how she planned to improve the Affordable Care Act, including how she’d lower the cost of prescription drugs, a winning issue with her base of aging boomers. Part of her plan, she explained, would stop pharmaceutical companies from receiving tax credits for advertising on TV.

  At this point Hillary would swirl her arms and segue into reciting, in florid detail, what sounded like a Cialis ad. “You know the ads, they have people walking through fields of wildflowers, walking on beaches, they have the name of the drug, which you know is unpronounceable, and then in a low voice . . .”—and Hillary would soften her voice, pull the microphone close to her lips and say in a deep guttural pitch that always made the Travelers look up from our laptops and chuckle—“If you take this drug, your nose will fall off . . .”

  On the rope line, when a French journalist shouted over Katy Perry’s “Roar” and thrust his camera Hillary’s way, knocking me in the head a couple of times, “Madam Secretary, for French TV, for French TV . . .” Hillary waved and put on a faux French accent. “Itzzz zoo good to zeeeee you. Bonjour. Bonjour. French TV, bonjour.”

  After these town halls, Hillary stuck around to shake hands and dole out compliments. “I love that outfit!” she said, tugging at a woman’s knitted scarf. “This is pretty. Is that attached? It’s really pretty.” She made small talk. Asked what kind of music she liked, Hillary swayed a little and shouted over a Kelly Clarkson song, “You know what, I’m kind of a sixties person to be honest. Old school, yeah, old school that brings back a lot of good memories.”

  Shouts of “Madam President” always made Hillary beam. “Doesn’t that sound good?” she’d say. “Let’s make it happen!” Hillary practically dove at a man in a gray leisure suit who carried a copy of Hard Choices under his arm. She signed, “Best wishes, Hillary,” and as she handed it back with a come-hither wink, said, “It’s a complicated world, isn’t it?”

  After speaking at a bowling alley in Adel, Hillary was so swarmed with a group of teachers (“I hope you get an excused absence today!”) that she grabbed my phone right out of my hand to pose for a selfie. Huma whispered in Hillary’s ear, “That’s Amy’s,” and Hillary handed it back so fast it looked as if she’d suffered electric shock. “Is that yours! Oh no!” she said.

  She would dispense policy prescriptions, pausing amid the crush of selfies to ask Iowans about their “COLA” (cost of living adjustments on social security) and whether they’d signed up for an “income contingent repayment plan.” I once saw Hillary criticize Bernie’s college plan (“I’m not going to take care of rich people”) to a thirteen-year-old whom she then referred to HillaryClinton.com to read the details of her “New College Compact.”

  “That’s what it’s called, okay?” Hillary said, crouching down to eye level with the teen. He stared blankly. “Want a selfie?!” she asked.

  1/29: Des Moines → Dubuque → Quad Cities

  1/30: Ames → Carroll → Cedar Rapids

  1/31: Council Bluffs → Sioux City → Des Moines

  On late-night rides, NPR’s Tamara Keith would call her three-year-old to read him The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Everyone thought this was adorable. But all I heard as Tamara repeated in her radio voice, “In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf . . .” was Your fertile window is closing. I’d turn up my music to block it out.

  On long drives, our conversations started to revolve entirely around Hillary’s Iowa idiosyncrasies. In ’08, Hillary talked about “the nurse from Waterloo” so regularly that the traveling press had lengthy hypothetical conversations about this romanticized nurse in Waterloo, always stretching out the loo for several syllables the way Hillary did. Eight years later, an enormous 3-D printer had become the new nurse from Waterluuuuu.

  Hillary discovered the printer (“the largest in North America”) by accident. It was December, and she was touring Cedar Valley TechWorks in Waterloo. She watched entranced as the contraption spit out a two-foot-tall, sand-and-resin three-dimensional version of her “H” campaign logo made entirely of discarded corncobs. “Oh, come on! Come on!” The printer might as well have produced a handful of fully formed Hillary superdelegates. The 3-D printer was made in Germany, but it quickly became Hillary’s favorite symbol of American exceptionalism. It was 3-D printer this and 3-D printer that five or six times a day, usually followed by her lengthy proposal to create advanced manufacturing jobs in the Midwest.

  “When I went to Cedar Valley TechWorks, I saw the biggest 3-D printing machine in all of North America,” she told a crowd in Waterloo. “It’s amazing.”

  In Dubuque, Hillary called the 3-D printer “a job magnet for the Midwest.” In Urbandale, she called the $1.5 million gadget “thrilling,” “a big job multiplier,” and “a business growth strategy.”

  Hillary vowed to be the president who helps Iowa “make this kind of machinery, 3-D printers in America” and, in keeping with her promise to only make modest promises, she even vowed to cut the ribbon on the first 3-D printer production plant.

  After the first couple of days Hillary had relayed the story so many times that she started to mix up the details. “I was at the Black Hawk community college. They bought the biggest 3-D printer in North America because they’re thinking about the future,” she said in Des Moines, Dubuque, and half a dozen other cities . . . Black Hawk College was in Moline, Illinois, and Hillary had never visited. But even (or especially?) with the muddled details, the giant 3-D printer became emblematic of Hillary’s campaign style. She could be so pedantic in expressing her sincere optimism for the American worker that she either bored audiences or went over their heads entirely.

  On the bus, the Travelers were simultaneously tired of hearing about the 3-D printer and at a complete loss for anything better to talk about . . .

  “Hillary won’t stop talking about that fucking 3-D printer.”

  “It’d be funny if she started placing it in whatever state she’s campaigning in at the moment.”

  “I was just at Henderson County Community College where they had the WORLD’S LARGEST 3-D PRINTER.”

  “That would redeem this whole humiliating ordeal of a campaign.”

  25

  You Will Look Happy

  Thing about Iowa—no one could call it.

  —Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes: The Way to the White House

  Des Moines → Manchester, Caucus Night, 2016

  By noon on Tuesday it was still too close to call Iowa. We landed in Manchester after 3:00 a.m., dropped our luggage at the Marriott Courtyard near the airport, and had to be in Nashua six hours later for a “Fighting for Us” rally.

  Bill Clinton summed up the campaign’s mood after Iowa when he took the stage in Nashua and opened with this stirring line: “Well, we’re here and we’re awake.”

  We were there and we were awake.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, on my last day in Des Moines, I’d spent the afternoon at the Marriott working from my Formica desk on two versions of my caucus-night story. I had a lyrical eight hundred words prewritten that assumed Hillary won. Quotes from friends gushed that the winning results showed Hillary had expelled the ghosts of 2008. She was a new-and-improved candidate with a well-oiled campaign. I assured Brooklyn the story wouldn’t run until the resul
ts had been tallied, so aides told me (embargoed, on the record) that Hillary’s Iowa win proved Bernie had no path and that Hillary would “handily defeat” the Republican nominee (Jeb or Rubio, obviously). “Mrs. Clinton became the first woman to win the Iowa caucuses . . .” I was writing the precursor to the November FWP story, the story all these years were leading up to.

  By noon, the campaign assured me (not for attribution) that their internal polling put Hillary on track to win the caucuses by five or six points (“outside the margin of error”) so I put minimal effort into prewriting the Hillary-loses-Iowa-again version. I cobbled out a quick hypothetical lede:

  Des Moines, Iowa—Hillary Clinton confronted an unexpected and devastating loss in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, thrusting her campaign into strategic upheaval and raising questions about whether her candidacy can address an angry and restless electorate.

  As the caucus results trickled in, I sat there typing and deleting, typing and deleting, typing and deleting. My print deadlines came and went. In five hours, I’d maybe written fifty words of usable “B matter.” It was almost midnight on the East Coast when an editor broke the news that my story would be banished to the two words a Times reporter never wants to hear: web only. (Despite all our talk about the web and “digital first,” the six most beautiful words in the English language remained, “They want it for the front.”) I should’ve prewritten a Hillary-says-she-won-but-basically-tied-and-we’re-still-not-sure-but-let’s-just-get-New Hampshire-over-with-and-move-on-to-the-primary-states-with-black-and-brown-people version, but my sources had been so certain. The polling data put her outside the margin of error.