Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  “She’ll change immigration. She’ll change the economy. She’ll change todo!” said Dora Gonzalez, a fifty-four-year-old Honduran with bright-red lips and black waves of hair that fell to her mid-chest, held back with two silver barrettes. “And she’s a mujer!” added her friend Elba Piñera, who wore gold hoop earrings and had reading glasses perched in her shirt collar.

  The Milano I ballroom was coated in gold paint and gold Grecian-themed carpet and coral-colored walls. Elaborate three-pronged sconces filled the windowless room with amber light. The casino workers rushed to claim scuffed conference-room seats, set up in tight rows across the two-thousand-square-foot ballroom. Even some of the Latino men, cooks and security guards and busboys, waved signs that said women for hillary.

  When a Spanish-speaking precinct captain instructed the crowd to sit on “la izquierda” if they were for Bernie, and “la derecha” if they were for Hillary, the Hillary side of the room erupted, thrusting their arms in the air, chanting “Hill-AH-ree! Hill-AH-ree!” This relegated to a sad little corner of the left side of the Milano I ballroom a handful of white men, some of whom appeared to be pit bosses, the buttons on their black vests temporarily undone, and a dozen or so younger Latino men, who held Bernie signs with the silhouette of his white hair and the words Educacion Gratis!

  The caucus had the feel of a frenzied, romantic, proletariat coup unfolding in a midsize casino ballroom instead of the Plaza de Armas of some Latin American capital, and lasted no more than five minutes. Similar pro-Hillary caucuses played out at casinos across the Strip. But that wasn’t the whole story.

  The Culinary Workers Union’s rank and file who lined up at the Wynn and Harrah’s and the Rio and New York, New York and handed the caucuses to Hillary had only been there at all because their bosses had given them their blessings and boxed lunches. And that had only happened because the Democratic Establishment made sure that it would. The man known as Prince Harry picked up the phone and called this city’s ruling class. He told the union bosses and hotel owners in so many words, Nice casino you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.

  When it was all over, Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and 72 percent of the state’s population, made Hillary the winner by more than five points. She’d regained the momentum and headed into South Carolina on an entirely different trajectory than just hours earlier.

  We started to write Bernie’s obituary. Hillary devoted her win to “hotel and casino workers who never wavered” and “tens of thousands of men and women with kids to raise, bills to pay, and dreams that won’t die.” She used plural pronouns like we and us more than usual, avoiding I. “I’m on my way to Texas. Bill is on his way to Colorado. The fight goes on! The future is within our grasp!”

  On deadline and with no office center in sight, I took the escalators two flights down to the casino where I spotted an empty electrical outlet next to a Sex and the City–themed slot machine and sat down to charge my laptop. A security guard came by and told me I couldn’t sit there unless I was gambling so I loaded a few quarters and dollar bills into the slot machine as I typed, wondering if I could submit the expenses to our draconian newsroom administrator. Were they “Entertainment” or “Water, Snacks and Incidentals”? I walked away with forty-five dollars when Mr. Big aligned with two pairs of Carrie’s Manolo Blahniks. A waitress dropped off a bottle of Caesars-branded water and I broke open the plastic cap and took a long sip. I looked at my phone and saw the news that Jeb! had dropped out.

  Jen said it was the campaign’s best day yet. Backstage, Hillary cried. On the way to the Elite Travel private terminal of McCarran International Airport, the Travelers and staff picked up six packs of Peroni, and everyone landed in Houston for a late-night rally feeling happy drunk.

  31

  The Plane Situation

  March 2016

  The Friday morning before the South Carolina primary, Hillary made an unannounced stop at the Saffron Cafe & Bakery in Charleston. Still high from Vegas, she floated over to a table full of Southern frat boys, a groom and his ten groomsmen, each more clean-cut than the next. “That looks like a really good Bloody Mary!” Hillary said, eyeing their cocktails at approximately 10:44 a.m.

  Barb, the campaign photographer, instructed the dudes to kneel down on one knee as if they were proposing and positioned Hillary at the center. “I loooooooove having men at my feet,” Hillary said. The next day, she beat Bernie by forty-seven points in South Carolina.

  Saturday, 2/27

  Charleston, SC en route Birmingham, AL

  Birmingham, AL en route Columbia, SC

  RON [remaining overnight]–Columbia, SC

  Sunday, 2/28

  Columbia, SC en route Memphis, TN

  Memphis, TN en route Nashville, TN

  Nashville, TN en route Pine Bluff, AR

  RON–Pine Bluff, AR

  Monday, 2/29

  Pine Bluff, AR en route Springfield, MA

  Springfield, MA en route Boston

  Boston en route Norfolk, VA

  RON–Norfolk, VA

  Tuesday, 3/01

  Norfolk, VA en route IAD

  IAD en route Miami, FL

  RON–Miami, FL or commercial to YOUR final destination

  With Trump surging, Republicans delivering bleary-eyed concession speeches almost daily, and Bernie appearing to be the walking dead, my editors had virtually forgotten I (or Hillary) existed as Super Tuesday approached. My colleagues on the investigative team had a gripping deep-dive into Hillary’s legacy in Libya. The Times, afraid the story could affect the race, decided not to publish it until after the polls closed in South Carolina. I rolled my eyes when I heard this. I’d spent months talking to voters in black churches and cafés and union halls, and the last thing on their minds was Hillary’s use of smart power in the ouster of Qaddafi. I received a late-night email from a Very Senior Editor who’d never commented on my coverage before. He asked me what the campaign’s reaction to the Libya story was. “I haven’t heard anything,” I replied. “They’re all pretty elated after last night’s win.”

  I didn’t know why the email upset me so much. Yes, I was hurt. I was in the midst of covering an evening rally in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a timeworn, predominantly black town on the Delta Lowlands with a poverty rate more than twice the national average. I’d been on the road for weeks, had just logged another twenty-hour day, and wanted Very Senior Editor to acknowledge my work. The Oscars were happening during the rally, and we snuck peeks at Twitter in between transcribing Hillary’s comments about Empowerment Zones and the New Markets Tax Credit and statistics from the Clinton years (“During Bill’s terms, the median African American family income went up thirty-three percent . . .”). New York and the Times newsroom existed on a planet as foreign to Pine Bluff as the red carpet at the Dolby Theatre. One where people had an entirely different perspective on the election than in the places I visited. They had different concerns from the people Hillary spent her days talking to, different expectations from the families who stuck trump yard signs into their freshly mowed grass.

  I couldn’t answer Very Senior Editor’s question even if I’d wanted to. Traveling with the campaign meant I knew far less about what was happening inside the campaign than if I’d been back in New York working the phones or meeting sources in Brooklyn.

  It had been eighty-four days since Hillary held a press conference. We all bitched incessantly that we needed more access, but Hillary didn’t see any reason to talk to us. With everything going her way post-Vegas, her media strategy could continue to consist of a couple of sit-downs with the celebrity talk-show host Amanda de Cadenet and GloZell Green, the YouTube comedian with the silvery emerald lips. Compared to the Trump press corps, whom he publicly humiliated and who had to dodge loogies and abuse from enraged Everydays (at least one of whom wore a T-shirt that said rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required), the Hillary press corps was coddled. We didn’t need bodyguards to escort us into her ralli
es, and while being ignored was unpleasant, it was nothing compared to a candidate who threatened to blow up the First Amendment.

  Still, I would’ve endured being called third rate at a rally in Youngstown if it meant Hillary gave us as many interviews as Trump gave reporters. He put on a big show of hating us, but he’d get on the phone, no problem.

  In a way, Trump’s mistreatment of the media had done Hillary a favor by freeing her of the decorum of a traditional campaign. But it also meant the reporters who spent their days trying to cover and explain Hillary to the American public never got to bridge, as one reporter who traveled with the first lady in the 1990s put it, the “disconnect between the kind of person you could convey or are in private and amongst us on these trips, so much sense of humor, very warm and engaging in what we see on television or in the news.” How could we communicate Hillary’s “funny, wicked, and wacky” side to voters if we never saw it for ourselves?

  Had this been any other election year, the candidate and top aides would be flying on the same plane as the traveling press as had been the practice in every modern presidential campaign since the dawn of mass air travel. Instead Brooklyn organized a separate press charter for the Travelers and billed our news outlets, while Hillary and her staff flew on their own private plane.

  In 2008, the close quarters of Hill Force One and, later, the Change We Can Believe In Express led to the only real interactions I had with Hillary and Obama. I remember Hillary taking over the intercom to welcome us on the rickety 737. “Welcome aboard the maiden flight of Hill Force One. My name is Hillary, and I am so pleased to have most of you on board,” she said. “FAA regulations prohibit the use of any cell phones, BlackBerries, or wireless devices that may be used to transmit a negative story about me.”

  We developed such solidarity on the shared plane that the press decorated our quarters with a Hillary Pantsuit Schedule, an oversize wall calendar with a rotating cast of Hillary in forsythia yellow (Monday), turquoise blue (Tuesday), fiesta pink (Wednesday), sunset orange (Thursday), show-stopper red (Friday).

  The night of the Ohio and Texas primaries, the campaign plane hit gale-force winds, and I saw lightning flash against the wing tips. Tina Brown looked as if she was about to puke. I grasped hands with one of the New York tabloid reporters and, thinking we’d die, actually said, “Now, we’ll never know if she won Ohio.”

  Peter Nicholas, who was with the Los Angeles Times then, loves to tell the story of the time Hillary walked in on me taking a piss. “She opens the door and there’s Amy with her pants around her ankles . . .” he said to a small crowd of senior campaign aides and TV correspondents during the spaghetti dinner at Podesta’s house. Peter always told the story with his usual theatrical peculiarity and amplified fidgets and grins, glances at me, at the carpet, me, the carpet.

  I remember the moment exactly, when the accordion door with the broken lock began to split in its middle and fold into the campaign plane’s back lavatory, the smell of the blue ammonium swirling in the bowl, a sunset-orange pant leg forcing its way in. I knew that hue didn’t belong to the other reporters on the plane. An instant later it hit me: That was Thursday’s pantsuit. Hillary Clinton needs to pee. I’d already pulled my jeans up to the fleshy part of my sit bones when we made eye contact.

  “Uh, um, Senator, I’m so sorry, I guess the lock isn’t working, and . . .” I started. Her facial features widened, and before she could say anything, a Secret Service agent inserted his tree trunk of a torso between us and Hillary backed up like Ginger Rogers sashaying into a rent-a-jet’s service area. I rushed back to my seat with my fly still down.

  Peter, who sat in the same row as me in the designated Major Dailies seats of the plane, noticed the commotion and asked in his loudest outdoor voice, “Um, did Hillary just walk in on you urinating?”

  In April, when it was obvious Hillary wouldn’t be the nominee, I switched over to covering Obama and assumed a seat on the Change We Can Believe In Express.

  Two months before the ’08 general election, Bobby surprised me and proposed. He had a sunburned nose and hair so dark it blended in with the night sky. He got down on one knee at the front of the bow on a sailboat in the Sea of Cortez and pulled the navy-blue velvet box out of the pocket of his cargo shorts, where he’d hidden the ring when we passed through immigration in Mexico a couple of days earlier. “You know the way I’ve always liked you . . .” Bobby said, over the yelps of sea lions and the waves brushing against the starboard. The air smelled of salt water and the green enchiladas cooking in the kitchen below.

  I’d never seen myself as somebody’s wife, but Bobby understood me better than anyone. He’d put up with long distance in Japan. When I left him again to meet up with Hillary in ’07, he’d rented a car to meet me in New Hampshire. He’d built us bookshelves with the crafty optimism that we’d one day settle down. Or not. Either way, he knew what he was getting, and he’d always liked me anyway. And I’d come to think of him as my home, a safe, warm space in the form of a hunky Irishman whose very being told me everything would be okay and without whom I’d cease to exist. I said yes. Thirty-six hours later, I was back on the road in Obama’s traveling press in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

  It didn’t take long before my trail friends gushed over my new radiant-cut diamond that still felt odd on my finger. Obama strolled down the aisle to the back of the plane where we were sitting. We rushed to ready our voice recorders and cameras assuming he’d do an impromptu press avail. Instead, Obama walked right up to me and said, “Okay, lemme see the rock.” I stretched my hand out, and he entered dad mode. “That’s great, so when are you quittin’?” He asked how long we’d been dating. (“Okay, three years is a decent stint.”) He said he wanted to make sure I had plenty of time to plan the wedding (“After the campaign? Okay, well you know these things take time. You’ve gotta pick your dress . . .”). He offered to have the Secret Service and FBI do a “full background check” on Bobby. “Happy to. The FBI can get involved.”

  Bobby and I got married a year later in San Miguel de Allende, a colonial town in central Mexico. We had mariachis in white charro suits, a taco truck, and a donkey named Domingo that served tequila on his back. Our wedding programs included the Yeats quote, “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” At the rehearsal dinner, my parents played the video of Obama congratulating me.

  Eight years later, those kinds of intimacies were unimaginable.

  Everyone blamed Robby for what became known as the Plane Situation. It wasn’t true. Robby was a miser, but flying Hillary around on her own plane didn’t save money. The campaign spent $2 million on private planes between June and January when the election still hinged on only a handful of states. It cost a fortune to maintain multiple private planes for “all three Clintons,” not to mention the logistics involved. A refurbished Boeing 737 would’ve been more economical. The truth was Hillary didn’t want to fly on the same plane as us. And because she was running against Trump, she didn’t have to. He’d tossed all traditional decorum out the window of his twenty-five-year-old gold-plated 757—which, in classic smoke-and-mirrors fashion, he’d acquired from a now-defunct low-cost Mexican airline. Why couldn’t Hillary have her own plane, too?

  What Hillary didn’t understand—or didn’t want to accept—was that Trump could lick his fingers after eating a bucket of greasy KFC on board his 757 and maintain the aura of the workingman—even if he did spend most of his business career screwing over said workingman. Meanwhile, Hillary, who regardless of what you thought of her personally had detailed policy plans and a real determination to “lift middle-class wages” and “put Americans back to work,” couldn’t shake her image as a rich lady from Westchester. She flew on private planes and wore tunics that Everydays couldn’t buy off the rack at a Macy’s. Hillary’s girlfriends finally forced her to stop saying, “You shouldn’t have to be the granddaughter of a president or a secretary of state to receive . .
. all the support and advantages that will one day lead to a good job and a successful life.” Hillary loved the line, but it only reminded voters that she was one-half of a political dynasty. At one event, when Hillary did the granddaughter line (“Eighty percent of a child’s brain is formed before the age of three . . .”) a longtime aide leaned over and whispered to me, “I guess I was brain-dead by age four.”

  But nothing made Hillary seem like more of a monarch than her insistence that she be cocooned in the clouds at thirty-six thousand feet a safe distance from the press and the Everydays, surrounded only by her royal court, security, and a spread of crudités. And as the campaign’s true power center—meaning Huma, Brown Loafers, Jen Palmieri, Policy Guy and Dan Schwerin (who both traveled on occasion), and assorted friends from the White House years—flew around in a pimped-out fuselage, it became easier for Hillary to ice out Brooklyn. Several senior aides thought she should share a plane with the press, the way she had in 2008 and at the State Department, arguing that the close quarters always led to warmer coverage. “She doesn’t want to do it,” Huma would say. Oh, and sorry, but there’s no room on the plane for you. Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s secretary in the White House, once called Hillaryland “a little island unto themselves.” In 2016, the little island had become a Falcon 900B heavy jet.

  Being ensconced in our own hulk of cherrywood and leather seats and cream-colored carpet in the sky meant the only regular contact the Travelers had with anyone outside our own ranks was the young press advance staffers tasked with keeping us on schedule. This was an almost impossible feat. We always stayed behind to pee or file our story or both. We made the bus wait if we forgot our iPhones in a bathroom stall (guilty) or got caught up in conversations with the Everydays. Now that we flew to multiple states a day, falling behind schedule meant the entire press corps could spend thousands of dollars to fly to the next city or state only to miss Hillary’s speech. This may come as a shock, but neither she nor Trump waited for the traveling press to start.