Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  The campaign had even less idea about what to say. Hillary arrived at her victory rally at Drake University a couple of hours late wearing red. I stood on a folding chair in the back of the room and marveled at how good Hillary, hell, the whole family, was at smothering any honest emotional reaction. With Bill and Chelsea standing onstage behind her, Hillary drew into some deep reserve of fakery and willed herself into looking happy, as if trying hard enough would make it so. I remembered the advice Huma had given to a sobbing Anthony Weiner staffer after the Carlos Danger sexting scandal enveloped her husband’s mayoral bid. “I assume the photographers are still outside, so you will look happy?” Huma said.

  With a plastered-on grin, Hillary pointed at the crowd, equal parts Iowans, Washington insiders, and New York donors and a pile of baby boomers who came up in caravans from Arkansas. I saw Hillary smooth her suit jacket. She ran her palms down the sides of her thighs, the kind of fidgety gesture she hardly ever made onstage.

  “I love it! Wow, what a night, an unbelievable night,” she said, letting the word “unbelievable” hang there. You will look happy. “I stand here tonight breathing a big sigh of relief. Thank you, Iowa!”

  Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” came on, ending Hillary’s six-minute-and-forty-five-second speech. “LOADING!” a rosy-cheeked campaign staffer yelled over the campaign’s newest girl-power pop anthem. We rolled up our power cords and trudged through the parking lot to the bus with our open laptops cradled in our arms. The Travelers looked aghast.

  “Um, what just happened?”

  “That didn’t feel like a victory rally.”

  “No, no it did not,” I said.

  We were sitting on the bus in the parking lot when my phone exploded with texts and emails. Democrats saw the virtual tie as an omen and wanted campaign manager Robby Mook “layered.” Nobody said he should’ve been fired; that would’ve led to too many negative headlines. Nothing drove news traffic like Clinton infighting.

  The Democrats who’d come up during the McGovern campaign, in particular, worried the thirty-six-year-old campaign manager’s approach—all math and no poetry—needed to be replaced by some old-fashioned fire. (The younger operatives would point out that Nixon defeated McGovern in a landslide.) People proposed Maggie Williams, who had been Hillary’s chief of staff in the White House and was one of the only people who could tell Hillary no. Maggie had been dragged into easing Clinton melodrama for years, including reluctantly taking over in 2008 from then-campaign-manager Patti Solis Doyle who was fired after Iowa. To avoid negative headlines, Robby could even keep his title and his corner office and his standing desk and his “mafia” of obedient bros who’d followed him from McAuliffe’s Virginia governor’s race. But Maggie had been there, done that. She was content to offer outside counsel from her perch at Harvard.

  By 2016, I’d forgotten most of the katakana alphabet that I’d attempted to learn in Japan, but I did speak fluent Political Cliché. I turned again and again to the most overused words of the Democratic primary: Organization and Enthusiasm. I asked Bernie and Hillary people which one was more important. They all said, “You need both.” But like a bratty teenager playing a drinking game, I demanded an answer: “You MUST choose.” Most people settled (not for attribution) on Enthusiasm. “Organization don’t mean shit if people aren’t excited about the candidate,” a veteran Texas Democrat said. Robby was an Organization man; Bill Clinton, the ultimate Enthusiasm guy. “What’s the data and organization for if voters don’t like Hillary?” Bill would say to anyone who would listen. “They need to see the person I know.”

  About a week before the caucuses, at the end of an epically newsless bus swing, Demi Lovato performed “Confident” on campus at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, the epicenter of the “Feel the Bern” movement. She introduced Hillary, saying there wasn’t “a woman more confident than Hillary Clinton.” (Telling the crowd the truth—that one of Hillary’s more endearing qualities is that despite her successes she is a heaping pile of insecurities—wouldn’t have played well.) Hillary came onstage to a sea of Snapchatting coeds. She thanked Demi and spent a total of 3.5 minutes reminding the couple thousand students in the audience to caucus.

  I waded into the crowd afterward. I didn’t meet a single student who said they were supporting Hillary. “I’m just here for Demi,” a rail-thin sophomore named Tyler told me. So why was he wearing an h sticker? He looked down at his plaid flannel shirt as if it surprised him to see it stuck there against his almost inverted chest. “I don’t know. They gave it to me. But Demi’s cool, she’s got my vote.” We heard the same responses at Katy Perry concerts and Lena Dunham house parties.

  “I’m here for Lena,” said Heather, a thirty-three-year-old from Cedar Rapids. “I don’t want to vote for someone for president of the United States because I love Lena Dunham.”

  Pete D’Alessandro, Bernie’s top man in Iowa, could hardly drum up an endorsement from anyone other than Susan Sarandon and Mark Ruffalo. But when I asked him about Enthusiasm vs. Organization, he compared these star-studded Hillary events to a story from the 1968 campaign. Pete had slithery hair and a goatee and none of the polish of the political class who worked for Hillary, but he spoke about the race with a Zen certitude that I never heard from the Clinton camp, a Jedi master in Dickies and shabby black fleece. In ’68, Eugene McCarthy’s campaign held a barbecue that attracted hundreds of voters lined up with mccarthy for president signs as far as the eye could see. The scene led Bobby Kennedy’s campaign to think McCarthy had a lock on the primary. Kennedy ended up defeating him badly.

  “Turned out,” Pete said, “they just came for the ribs.”

  I eventually settled on a nut graph that said the uncertain outcome had “dealt a jolting psychological blow to the Clinton campaign, leaving volunteers, donors and aides confused throughout the night, and then crestfallen.”

  Our newspapers and networks paid $1,700 per person for us to take the three-hour press charter flight from Des Moines to Manchester. Hired Gun Guy strong-armed our bosses to call Iowa in Hillary’s favor while swearing to us that she’d obviously won. I didn’t think I could experience a middle-of-the-night charter more fraught than the flight to New Hampshire after Hillary’s third-place finish in 2008, when the campaign, after blowing $50 million and nearly half a year there, collectively pooh-poohed the state. “The worst thing would be to overcount Iowa and its importance,” Mark Penn told us on the let’s-get-the-fuck-out-of-Iowa caucus-night charter to New Hampshire eight years earlier. “Iowa is so small. It’s like a mayor’s race in a medium-size city,” added one of the ’08 Guys. At least back then the campaign’s spin was quotable. The shit sandwich the ’16 team tried to feed us was virtually useless. No matter how hard he pushed, and how slick his delivery, something about Hillary’s Hired Gun Guy telling us “We believe strongly that we won tonight” didn’t exude triumph.

  The press climbed over the seats and poured into the aisle. We steadied ourselves on each other’s shoulders and hoisted each other up until our muddy snow boots stood on the leather business-class seats. As photographers and cameramen affixed their lenses above our heads, the print reporters squatted down on the ground, our slingshots loaded. “Can you move your hair?” a photographer yelled at me in a request that would become almost as frequent as “What’s the Wi-Fi password?” We were ready for our $1,700 gaggle. It went something like this:

  [truncated audio]

  Hired Gun Guy: We’ve heard a lot in the last few weeks about Enthusiasm, but it turns out there’s a heck of a lot of Enthusiasm for a progressive who will get things done.

  Traveler #1: Is your internal polling off? It seems like this came as a surprise. It had you up . . .

  Hired Gun: What do you mean?

  Traveler #1: A tie isn’t what you were expecting over the past few days . . .

  Jen: We believe we won.

  Traveler #2: Why didn’t you declare victory in that speech?

  Hired Gun & Jen:
We did.

  Traveler #3: You guys had a ground operation [i.e., Organization] that was second to none. What does it say about the candidate and her message? Was there a problem there?

  Hired Gun: We believe she won.

  And so on for nine minutes and thirty-one seconds until Jen announced, “The rest of the plane will be off the record.”

  I heard from my editors at the Times who were stuck in the Waterloo conference room because of a looming blizzard. They needed an official campaign comment for my story before we took off. I made the very bad decision to yell at The Guys, “Are you bringing in any new advisers to the campaign? Layering over Robby?” I asked this not once, not twice, but three times. “I said we’re now off the record,” Jen shot back as she walked toward the staff seats at the front of the plane. Then Brown Loafers, who of the current crop of Guys took things the most personally, unleashed all his pent-up rage about the Times, and my coverage, into one drop-dead look and three irascible words: “Are you serious?”

  I was always misreading the ebbs and flows of the press scrum. After the Guernica press conference, I almost never asked about Hillary’s emails, figuring the TV reporters who were jumping out of their chairs with “WHAT ABOUT YOUR EMAILS?” questions had that covered. I’d scream softballs (“What kind of ice cream did you order?”) when my editors needed answers about some shady Clinton Foundation donor. Or I’d shout a question about foreign policy (“Do the reports of ISIS holding Yazidi women as sex slaves change your thoughts on intervention?”) over the mooing of dairy cows at the Iowa State Fair.

  In 2008, Hillary used to tell me I was asking the wrong questions. “Well, Amy, that’s not what you should be asking . . .” and then proceed to respond to the question she wanted to answer. “God, I wish you weren’t always asking the wrong questions,” Anne Kornblut, the Washington Post reporter, would say as the scrum disassembled.

  I botched even the most straightforward questions. In South Dakota in 2008, I raised my hand to ask Obama a question about his faith outreach adviser, Joshua DuBois, and whether he could win over evangelicals. But I’d accidentally said Jeremiah Wright.

  “Senator, Jeremiah Wright told me—”

  “Jeremiah Wright,” Obama said, taken aback.

  “I mean Joshua—”

  “You mean Joshua DuBois?”

  At this point the entire press corps was laughing so hard that I don’t think Obama heard me when I muttered, “Right.”

  Late that night, on the “Change We Can Believe In” plane, Obama came back to the press quarters. I hadn’t met him yet and introduced myself. “I know you,” he said, with a giggle. “You’re the one who asked me about Jeremiah Wright.”

  But asking about Robby’s potential ouster in front of the entire traveling press corps before the caucuses had been officially called, or any alcohol served, had possibly been worse. Hacked emails later showed that Brown Loafers had called me an “idiot” to one of Hillary’s closest friends, Capricia Marshall, after she’d asked about my reporting on Robby. I would’ve thought he’d called me worse. (I did get a nice note from the Trump campaign saying that Mr. Trump didn’t think I was an idiot.)

  We must’ve been somewhere over Ohio. A couple of photographers and sound guys were on their third lukewarm can of Coors Light. I chased Brown Loafers down the aisle to try to explain myself and hopefully smooth things over.

  “Would you rather I don’t ask you about rumors I’m hearing?”

  He kept walking.

  I tried again. “We should really talk about this . . .”

  He didn’t turn his head. He walked straight to the back of the plane and plopped down with the Tripods, whispering to them over red wine in plastic cups and reminding me, without saying a word, of my own minusculitude. That flight would draw a line in the sand between me and The Guys that a couple of days later in New Hampshire would morph into an insurmountable moat.

  26

  He Deprived Her of a Compliment

  Manchester, February 2016

  “‘Psychological blow’? Are you in my head, Amy? No, really, tell me, are you in my fucking head?” His eyes protruded, a web of veins pulsing from his forehead. I knew it had to be bad.

  Of all The Guys, this was Hillary’s measured, policy-minded one. I never knew this Guy to confront reporters over much of anything, except maybe to point out Hillary’s role in the Iran nuclear deal. (“When Iran was serious about coming to the table, we had laid the table. By this point it was Secretary Kerry’s turn . . .”) But in the lobby of the Manchester Radisson three days after the Iowa caucuses, he saw me, stopped his deliberate stride, turned around, and unleashed.

  By 1:00 p.m. the day after the caucuses, during the “We’re Here and We’re Awake” rally in Nashua, the AP had called Iowa for Hillary. She’d defeated Bernie by one-fourth of one percentage point, including, we later learned, winning six coin tosses in tied precincts. The future of our democracy dangling in the air as Iowa’s state coin descended in the Weeks Middle School gymnasium, home of the Wildcats.

  Tails. Hillary gets the extra delegate.

  Hillary couldn’t stand when reporters “put her on the couch,” a common practice given the “opaque reality” of her own self. Even Hillary’s closest girlfriends admitted she was impenetrable, so what the hell did some reporter who was in high school during the Clinton administration know?

  Aside from the “psychological blow” stuff, I heard that Hillary was livid about the “tone” of my Iowa story. She went on a tear to The Guys that only she, Hillary Clinton (she’d recently dropped the Rodham), sufferer of double standards, endurer of an impossibly high bar, number one most put-upon politician in modern history, could win Iowa and still have the Times say the caucuses “dealt a jolting psychological blow” to her campaign.

  I couldn’t argue with that. But she was also Hillary Fucking Clinton and she essentially tied with a seventy-four-year-old Brooklyn-born Jew whose primary legislative achievements in a quarter century in Congress were the renaming of two post offices in Vermont. Now we were in New Hampshire where polls had Bernie up by as much as thirty points. Brooklyn stopped spending money in the state and aides urged Hillary to skip it and focus on Nevada and South Carolina. But New Hampshire had done a lot for the Clintons, and she would need its four Electoral College votes in the general.

  Hillary became sullen. There is an image of her with her head on Bill’s shoulder. He has his reading glasses on, and she is limp and resting on him like she doesn’t want to do it anymore. She was pouty and aggrieved but not surprised that the media hadn’t given her rightful due. Brooklyn summed up her sentiment as “I’m the first woman to ever win the Iowa caucus and it’s like it never happened.”

  I don’t regret the story or its tone. At the time, the caucuses looked like a tie and the campaign contemplated an upheaval. But I regretted the confrontation. I regretted that a couple of days into New Hampshire things had become so toxic with The Guys that they hardly spoke to me except for the most mature of the bunch, Policy Guy—the one who was also personally closest to Hillary—cornering me in a hotel lobby to spontaneously combust.

  I tried not to meet Policy Guy’s eyes. To my left there was a wall of windows, and I envisioned making my escape, busting through leaving an outline of my body in the glass like a cartoon cutout. I stammered, “Uh, well, um, I’d be uh happy to discuss your concerns with the story, or uh if you want to talk to my editor . . .”

  The lobby smelled of burnt breakfast sausages from the buffet that a couple of busboys were now packing up. The invite to the “Bloomberg Politics Breakfast Briefing with Robby Mook” read, “The event is a seated buffet breakfast, so please arrive by 7:15 to ensure that we can start on time.” I got there at 7:45 a.m. dreading seeing Robby, whom I’d just eviscerated to several million unique viewers.

  As usual, I tried to comfort myself with the free food, piling two halves of eggs Benedict topped with sauce as bright and yellow as antifreeze onto my plate. I took
an empty seat between Margaret Talev of Bloomberg and MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt at the end of the rectangular table ensconced in a black tablecloth and a white silk runner down the middle. The Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey, the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus, and USA Today’s Susan Page sat nearby. The men, Bloomberg’s Al Hunt, John Heilemann, CNBC’s John Harwood, and others were clustered together in the middle of the table as Robby and Hired Gun Guy held court, giving the room a gender divide as pronounced as at my third cousin’s Chabad-Lubavitch wedding ceremony.

  “My question is about the younger voters who seem to be in full-on rebellion against Hillary Clinton. I’ve never seen a seventy-point margin in a demographic in a primary like this—” one reporter started to ask.

  Robby interrupted, “Well, first of all, that’s based on an Iowa entrance poll, and . . .” (Days later, Bernie would win the New Hampshire primary by a sixty-nine-point margin among voters under thirty—this wasn’t an Iowa entrance-poll problem.)

  Robby, with his boyish good looks and buoyant, affable manner, had become somewhat of a sex symbol among a very specific subset of Washington power gays. He didn’t flaunt his position as the first gay campaign manager of a major presidential candidate. But Robby had a remarkable ability to move his lips without saying anything. We’d ask him questions, and words like “she’s going to fight for every single vote” and “Is the next president going to keep us pushing forward in the future or are we going to go back?” would come out. A couple of prominent gay political reporters started to refer to Robby as a cute robot “assembled in a closet in Vermont.”