Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  The GOP candidates by contrast were tripping all over themselves to prove their Christian bona fides.

  A few days after Trump referred to Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians,” making the eighth book of the New Testament sound like a buddy sitcom set in Athens, Maggie Haberman and I sat a few rows behind and to the left of Trump at the First Presbyterian Church in Muscatine, Iowa. Trump, his communications director, Hope Hicks, and campaign manager Corey Lewandowski arrived late to the little redbrick chapel up the street from a frozen river scattered with ice fishermen. Trump stayed for the whole sermon about the world’s largest ball of twine in Darwin, Minnesota, a metaphor for unexpected gifts. (“We don’t have much of a town left but that twine ball really draws them in . . .”) He then dropped two crisp fifty-dollar bills into the collection plate.

  When all the politics and caution were stripped away, Hillary was at her core a Methodist, a church lady, a fire-and-brimstone Jesus-saves believer. When I try to tell people this, they always say she’s just another pandering politician. Trust me, you don’t drop the prophet Micah in mid-conversation because you’re pandering. You can’t fake extended allusions to the Eight Beatitudes of Jesus (as she did during a town hall in Knoxville, Iowa) or casually quote the Jesuit academic Henri Nouwen’s parable on the prodigal son during a CNN town hall (as Hillary did in response to a rabbi’s question in Manchester).

  “Regardless of how hard the days are, how difficult the decisions are, be grateful, be grateful for being a human being, being part of the universe,” Hillary told the rabbi. “Be grateful for your limitations.”

  By the time Hillary arrived in Flint, her limitations were all anyone was talking about (myself included). In the finale of his sermon, Stewart declared to the congregation, now on their feet and filled with the temporary ecstasy of imminent salvation, “Hillary Clinton is on the waiting list,” and “Have I got a witness?”

  And the crowd shouted, “Amen!”

  Hillary took her place behind a wooden podium that dwarfed her small frame so that only her head and an inch or two of her tweed jacket showed. Behind her was a choir in purple and gold sleeves and a mural of a black, bare-chested Jesus being baptized in the River Jordan. Ushers in white uniforms settled into whatever empty seats they could find. By then some local reporters and the network embeds, who had also made the trip from Manchester, filled out the back pews.

  “I am here because for nearly two years, Flint’s water was poisoned,” Hillary said, sounding as I imagined the young activist who went undercover in Alabama in 1972 had sounded. “I’m here because for nearly two years, mothers and fathers were voicing concerns about the water’s color, about the smell, about the rashes it gave to those who were bathing in it.

  “Clean water is not optional, my friends, it’s not a luxury,” she said. “This is not merely unacceptable or wrong, though it is both. What happened in Flint is immoral.”

  Immoral. It wasn’t a word presidential candidates, especially Democrats, usually used, but I wasn’t watching a politician. This was Saint Hillary. The Sunday school teacher awakened by the left-leaning youth minister who believed in the Methodist tenet that “the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.” The first lady who defended her husband’s infidelity in Biblical terms: “You know, in Christian theology, there are sins of weakness and sins of malice, and this was a sin of weakness.”

  By the time I left the House of Prayer to get a flight back to Boston and cab it back to Manchester, Flint wasn’t the story. Not even close.

  Bill Clinton had gone off message. He told a crowd in Milford, New Hampshire, that Bernie was a “hermetically sealed” hypocrite. “When you’re making a revolution, you can’t be too careful with the facts,” he said.

  Meanwhile, Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem had declared war on young women for supporting Bernie—making Hillary’s seem like the embodiment of antiquated mean-girl feminism and driving even further away the very voters she’d hoped to inspire.

  “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” Albright, then seventy-eight, had said at a rally, repeating a line she often used.

  And Steinem, at a very sexy eighty-one, had pronounced on Bill Maher, “When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’”

  Cue outrage.

  My flight was delayed. The embeds and I settled into a booth at a TGI Fridays at the Detroit airport. By the time I finally got back to Manchester, it was after 3:00 a.m. I fell into my bed with all my clothes on and the dry heat of a midrange hotel cranked up on high, wondering if Flint, and Saint Hillary, had even really happened.

  28

  I Hate Everyone

  Manchester → New York City → Las Vegas, February 2016

  The morning of the New Hampshire primary, I was bound for another web only story about why Hillary lost. I was killing myself on the road and still falling behind. My editors weren’t thinking about me to write the main stories. My colleagues bulldozed me on primary and debate nights.

  “Oh, it’s just easier for [so-and-so] to write it because he’s here,” was usually how editors would explain it to me when I whined—and Jesus did I whine. I whined so much that even on a team of master whiners an exasperated editor told me as he loaded a Flavia pack into the hotel coffee maker that I was the worst. “Please, you mean I’m worse than [so-and-so] who everyone could hear screaming at you through closed doors?” Yes. “Worse than [so-and-so] who refused to leave New York for more than two days and then complained the whole time he was here?” Yes. “Worse than [so-and-so] who is usually on cable TV when everyone else is slaving away on deadline?” Yes.

  I adopted Hillary’s mood. I went around despondent and aggrieved, pissed off at the world, at my editors, at myself for not being “likable enough.” I’d even caught the sinus infection Hillary had been fighting off. When friends would check in on me, I’d send them all a meme of Toby Ziegler, the fictional White House communications director on The West Wing, looking suicidal in a drab brown suit with the quote, “There is literally no one in the whole world I don’t hate right now.”

  Jen Palmieri told me Hillary had been “working through a lot in her head” when she got introspective at a town hall at New England College right before the primary. “I am who I am,” Hillary said. “I can’t do some kind of personality transformation.”

  Same.

  After nearly twelve weeks straight on the road, one caucus, one primary, and countless days eating multiple meals at Panera Bread, I’d hoped to spend some time in New York. I missed Bobby and the Lower East Side and kale. I’d been wearing the same three Old Navy turtlenecks, in black, blue, and gray, for months. But Carolyn had other plans.

  In her Carolyn way, she explained, as we sat on lawn chairs in the stuffy poolroom at the Marriott Courtyard the morning of the New Hampshire primary, that she needed me to be the “Nevada bureau chief.” There was no such thing as the Nevada bureau chief. She needed me to keep an eye on the Democrats while most of the team focused on the GOP primary in South Carolina. I didn’t care. I was just relieved to feel the warmth of Carolyn’s sunshine on me again.

  I said yes and then started to explain that I needed to go home for a couple of days. “I’ve got to do laundry, repack, I haven’t seen Bobby in weeks—” I started. I hadn’t intended it, but there’s a better than average chance that this sounded like whining. Before I could finish the sentence, Carolyn turned her head toward the windows and squinted. At least a foot of fresh snow had fallen on top of the grimy older snow, bringing with it the chill of Carolyn’s disappointment. The air smelled of chlorine, and steam rose from a hexagon-shaped hot tub. “Well,” she said, “I guess I could get Adam to do it . . .”

  She meant Adam Nagourney, the Times’ senior-most political correspondent and a national treasure who’d been covering presidential campaigns since I was getting flicked in the head in the hallways of Hobb
y Middle School.

  Carolyn is a master motivator. She knew all our pressure points and pressed them in exactly the right way to get us to perform at our highest levels even when we felt so out of fuel that we’d prefer to collapse on the field—as I did that day in Manchester. My pressure point was the fear that one of my more esteemed colleagues would overshadow me on the Hillary beat and prove The Guys right. I fell for this every time. Explain to Carolyn that I had nonrefundable theater tickets and needed to leave the office by 7:30 p.m.? “Well, I can see if Pat wants to write it.” Start to spit out that Bobby planned a special anniversary dinner for us? “Okay, no problem, I mean, if you’re busy, I can check with Michael.” And every time, I replied just as I did by the indoor pool. “No, I’ll do it.”

  “Fabulous! You’re a star,” Carolyn said, popping up from the lawn chair, its silver plastic strips sagging from where she sat.

  Harry Reid asked if I was enjoying his state. “We’ve got no humidity here, so your hair won’t frizz,” he said. I realize this may seem like an odd thing for the senior-ranking Democratic senator to say, but my only thought was, how did he know? For months in Iowa and New Hampshire, my brittle split ends made my hair the consistency of a West Texas tumbleweed with the added static of my synthetic wool Times hat that I hardly ever took off except to sleep and shower. But thanks to a couple of days in the dry desert air of Las Vegas and the lemongrass citrus deep conditioner provided by the Wynn hotel and casino, my curls felt springy and light.

  “As a matter of fact, Senator, my hair hasn’t looked this good in months,” I told him. “Maybe every Jewish girl should live in Nevada.”

  Reid was right. A day into my Nevada bureau chief assignment and I felt like the warden had urged me to orchestrate a prison break.

  Three days earlier Bernie had trampled Hillary in New Hampshire. It was a clear, crushing, browbeating annihilation. Brooklyn knew Bernie would win by double digits, but they were thinking eleven or twelve points, not twenty-two fucking points.

  Hillary thanked supporters at Southern New Hampshire University in Hooksett, in the same gym where eight years earlier she’d unexpectedly beaten Obama and declared she’d “found my own voice.” I wrote that she left New Hampshire that night still searching for it. “Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?” Joel Benenson had asked the team.

  Before I could set up the Times’ Nevada bureau (also known as room 1009 at the Wynn), I had to make a quick trip to Milwaukee for the next Democratic debate. I was in a Delta comfort seat when Brown Loafers came down the aisle and checked his boarding pass. He looked at me in the seat next to his, made one of his signature facial expressions—a feigned overbite, chin-forward grin—and exhaled as he sat, cursed by New Hampshire primary voters and the commercial airline Gods.

  We made cordial small talk. I told him about the Iron Horse Hotel, my favorite boutique hotel in Milwaukee (“It’s nicer than the Bowery and costs like a hundred and twenty dollars a night . . .”), and about the local coffee (“You have to try Colectivo . . .”). I said Hillary needed to win the primary so my colleague Mark Landler’s upcoming book about her foreign policy would sell. “I’ve got a fair amount riding on this, too,” Brown Loafers replied. Then he flipped through the Times. He pretended to read for the rest of the flight, thumbing well into the vitamin pages, what we call stories that get banished to the inside pages—B6, B12, and so on. I pretended to nap.

  Because it would’ve been more awkward not to, we shared an Uber to the University of Wisconsin and as we rushed inside the auditorium with minutes to spare before the debate started, a protester shouted, “Hillary Clinton is a criminal!”

  “AND YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE!” Brown Loafers yelled back.

  The protester, sweeping his homemade sign down to his side, started to lunge toward us, yelling, “Hillary FOR PRISON!”

  We sprinted up the stairs, past security, through steamy glass doors, locked to outsiders but open to us because we had Secret Service credentials. Through the glass, we heard yells of “Go FUUUUUUCK yourselves!” We both laughed—real laughter for once, not the scoffing, cruel kind that we’d directed at each other so many times. We shared something, an instant that I forgot about entirely until many months later when the assholes of Wisconsin delivered the election to Trump.

  After the debate, Hillary added a speech in Harlem, a reset in the city that loved her the most. This gave me one night in New York, enough time to swap out my warmest winter clothes with some tank tops, sundresses, and a pair of sandals. Bobby and I tried to have breakfast at our favorite neighborhood diner, but I had to rush home to write a news story on Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, leaving Bobby with a plate full of uneaten bacon and the bill. Later that day I took a one-way JetBlue flight to Las Vegas.

  As Hillary morphed into a better version of herself in Clark County, so did I, letting go of all the crap that had built up in Iowa and New Hampshire. After so much time in states that felt alien, Las Vegas, especially away from the strip, felt like San Antonio. There were rows of almost identical stucco homes like the ones my parents downsized to a couple of years earlier, behind walled subdivisions with names like Alto Mesa and Hacienda Park. There were strip malls with tanning salons even though the temperatures in the winter rarely dipped below a sunny sixty-five degrees. The Mexican restaurants sold tacos al pastor and didn’t charge for chips and salsa or try to top it all off with melted cheddar. And Spanish was everywhere, not like in Des Moines or Manchester where the language was treated like background noise from a kitchen.

  In Vegas, Annie Karni and I took boxing lessons with Brady, a former Ultimate Fighter with a shaved head and a sinewy frame. Brady obviously hadn’t met many journalists because he was shocked at our willingness to punch each other. I’d had so much pent-up rage and office drama playing out in my head that when Brady yelled “Left hook!” I’d thrown an uppercut that knocked his plastic name tag off.

  That night Annie and I went to a Britney Spears concert. When a couple of male dancers in black leather first carried Britney onto the stage in an emerald-sequin-and-nude getup that hardly covered her gyrating ass, a man behind me said, “Good for Brits, she got her body back!” I wondered if I’d ever get my precampaign body back. A few songs in, while Brits flipped her blonde extensions as she lip-synched “Work Bitch,” I took a swig of my seventeen-dollar margarita and realized that, for the first time in months, I wasn’t thinking about Hillary Clinton.

  By the time we got in a black car back to the Wynn, we were back to our usual stressing about newsroom dynamics and the campaign and our insecurities about what we and our colleagues would do with our lives when it all ended.

  “What’s going to happen to Maggie if Trump wins?” Annie asked.

  The driver interrupted to say in a thick Bronx accent, “Yo, I don’t know who this Maggie is, but what’s going to happen to the country if Trump wins?”

  Hours later I saw that Britney, all covered up in a tight white turtleneck and jeans, went to meet Hillary at her suite at Caesars, posting a photo, their heads of iconic bottle-blonde hair touching, on Instagram, and calling her “an inspiration and beautiful voice for women around the world!!!” When the campaign interpreted the post as an endorsement, Britney (or more likely, her legal guardians) deleted the #ImWithHer hashtag, causing a mini scandal and putting an inevitable Hillary taint on my memory of the Britney show.

  At this stage of the race during the ’08 primary, I’d been the pool reporter assigned to “WJC duty.” I’d never seen anything close to the tickled anarchy that ensued when Bill Clinton walked into a casino unannounced. Three, two, one, chaos as the cocktail waitresses nearly dropped their trays and the senior citizens who sat on padded swivel chairs shoving quarters into the slot machines broke away from the glowing red sevens and the tourists in town for a bachelor party seemed to yell, “Bro! It’s Bill Clinton!” in unison.

  “I’m from Arkansas, I met you in 1987 in Pine Bluff,” a
cook at Caesars Palace told the former president. “Yeah, Donna, I remember that. How’s your momma doing?” I didn’t see Clinton catch a passing glimpse at her name tag, but he must have.

  We’d been in the basement of the MGM Grand with showgirls and kitchen workers lined up for their chance to shake his hand. Bill Clinton had turned and looked me in the eyes and said something that, eight years later, I kept going back to: “We had a little role reversal in New Hampshire. Hillary started running more of an insurgent campaign, an underdog campaign, and we like it that way. That’s how it ought to be. We’ve been running as the underdog most of our lives.”

  Hillary arrived back in Nevada the underdog. A couple of months earlier Bernie had been a nonentity in the state, but now his ads blanketed the airwaves in English and Spanish. He had organizers from Elko to Carson City and polls showed he could edge out a victory. For the first time of the entire campaign, it dawned on the entire cocksure Clinton operation that she could actually blow this thing . . . again.

  If there was any upside to the blowout in New Hampshire and the tightening polls in Nevada, it was that losing brought out Hillary’s best self. I saw it over and over. Bill was right. She needed to run scared—as she had in 2008 after Iowa. It was the only way for her to tap into a deep reserve of retail-campaigning talent. Hillary couldn’t truly pour herself into a room unless she felt as though it was all slipping away.

  It was 12:35 a.m. local time on the Thursday before the Nevada caucuses when Hillary, in black slacks, glasses on, hair flattened from a day of travel, took the elevator downstairs at Caesars Palace. She headed toward the bustling heart of the hotel where mostly Latina housekeepers folded sheets and towels with tight corners and stacked them in bottom-heavy piles topped off with pillowcases and face towels.