by Amy Chozick
These twenty-something press aides reported to Brown Loafers. I’d seen him as OG’s marionette for months, but these aspiring press secretaries looked up to him as if he were the CEO of publicly traded spin. They took their main task—taking our meal orders—so seriously that I can only hope they’ll one day be running the country. (Obama’s press luggage handler in 2008, Eric Lesser, kept spreadsheets of our bags and once chased a red negligee rumored, incorrectly, to belong to Maureen Dowd down the tarmac. He is now a state senator in Massachusetts.)
“Below please find today’s meal options for both lunch and dinner. Please send me your lunch orders by 11:30 a.m. and your dinner orders by 4:00 p.m.,” they’d email, usually attaching a Panera Bread menu that I’d memorized a couple of states back. We’d often mull the menu and respond with two words: Hard Choices. When one staffer sent us a stern reminder the night before “Please reply to me with your order by 7:00 p.m. (EST) today” for the following day’s lunch order, we wrote back, “This is getting ridiculous,” and “TOO SOON.” They’d send around alphabetized Excel spreadsheets . . .
Alba, Carmen
Curried Cauliflower and Kale Salad
Becker, Amanda
Curried Cauliflower and Kale Salad
Chozick, Amy
Quinoa Salad with Chicken (or Turkey)
Earle, Geoffrey
Pistachio Chicken Salad Sandwich on Multigrain
Epstein, Jennifer
Curried Cauliflower and Kale Salad with Chicken
Fraser-Chanpong, Hannah
Chopped Salad with Chicken
. . . so that by mid-March we all knew each other’s dietary preferences. NPR’s Tamara Keith doesn’t eat cheese. Reuters’s Amanda Becker is a vegetarian. Annie Karni once threw off the entire spreadsheet system by sending in a late change to her lunch order (from salmon to the barbecue chicken plate). “Annie, please update me on the snacks you plan to have on the plane,” Dan Merica emailed the group. Ruby Cramer wrote, “Really hope the BBQ was the right choice after all.”
After days of nonstop bitching, The Guys decided to throw us Tony Goldwyn. I would’ve preferred if Goldwyn remained the villain from Ghost who came into my life in 1990 at the same time as the Righteous Brothers and Patrick Swayze’s abs. Instead, the Hollywood actor became the embodiment of Hillary’s neutered (or should I say spayed?) traveling press.
We were in Nashville when the actor sat with his legs spread wide across one of the leather seats of our luxury bus rental and gushed about how much he loved campaigning for Hillary. He may or may not have known The Guys were using him as a pawn. I stood up in my seat, my back pressed against the window to get a profile shot of Tony, his salt-and-pepper waves, the first few buttons of his white dress shirt left undone under a navy-blue blazer. By now everyone knew Tony as the philandering forty-fourth president who governed, for the most part, on his ability to fill out a tailored suit and squeeze in a West Wing quickie. His role on the soapy network drama Scandal gave his ubiquitous presence on the campaign a certain meta quality that Hillary ate up for the same reasons she loved to drop that she binge-watched The Good Wife and Madam Secretary and House of Cards—all TV series that ranged from exhibiting casual Clinton undertones to small-screen propaganda.
But mostly, Hillary loved Tony because he was hot and devoted to her. His jaw was shaped like a refrigerator, and he had feral gray eyes, and beneath all of that was an easiness and intellect that caused the women of Hillary’s press corps to abandon whatever story we were working on to flip our hair and ask useless questions like “What did you think of Iowa?” and “How does Hillary seem today?” The Guys knew us so well.
Later that afternoon, I lost any shred of self-respect I had left when Tony broke the only news we’d gotten out of Hillary in weeks. She was shaking hands with college students at the Fido coffee shop in Nashville, a converted pet shop with exposed brick walls and track lighting, when Goldwyn asked what she thought of Trump not denouncing David Duke’s support (a question she’d ignored when the Travelers asked).
“Oh, that’s pathetic,” Hillary said in Tony’s direction, a response we overheard and all used in our stories. The CNN chyron flashed Hillary Calls Trump on KKK Leader “Pathetic.”
That’s when Huma handed Hillary a latte in a to-go cup, made with locally grown Tennessee honey, cinnamon, milk, and espresso, and said to her boss, “They’re amazing. They’re making a ton of them for us to take.” The Travelers watched this, our mouths watering, as Hillary and Huma headed out a back door.
32
The Gaffe Tour
March 2016
The less I interacted with Hillary, the greater her imperial hold on my brain became. I used to get my hair blown out straight so I could go a week (nine days if I didn’t sweat) on the road without washing it. But in early March I quit doing this, afraid Hillary wouldn’t recognize me if she looked out at the press scrum, decided to acknowledge us, and didn’t see my usual mane of brown curls. I started to have nightly Hillary dreams. We usually gossiped like old girlfriends. We were trying on clothes in adjacent dressing rooms at a Zara or maybe it was a Mango, but it was definitely in Barcelona. I couldn’t button a size six pair of pants, and Hillary told me I must be pregnant. I said it was campaign weight, and we argued like that from underneath the dressing room stall for what felt like hours. I’d wake up and relay these dreams to Bobby, until even he started to question my sanity. “Fucking hell, with the Hillary dreams,” he said, rolling onto his side away from me one Sunday morning.
Hillary won eight of the thirteen contests on Super Tuesday. We’d entered the “Bernie, Who?” phase of the primary when she’d refer only vaguely to “my esteemed opponent.” Hillary had been so pumped after South Carolina that she’d even showed flashes of Saint Hillary, preaching about the country’s need for more “love and kindness.” At a rally in Nashville, when she heard a chant of “We love you Hillary!” she stopped and said, “You know, I’m all about love and kindness, so I sure appreciate that.” Her reworked stump speech focused almost entirely on denouncing Trump. The most controversial woman in American politics for the past couple decades had finally found her raison d’être—the Great Unifier.
“What a Super Tuesday!” Hillary said at her victory rally at the Ice Palace Film Studios in Miami. “We know we’ve got work to do. But that work, that work is not to make America great again. America has never stopped being great. We have to make America whole—we have to fill in what’s been hollowed out.”
Trump was no longer the Pied Piper. He was the unacceptable alternative who would motivate Democrats and drive independents, moderate Republicans, the half of the country who disliked and distrusted Hillary, to Her side. I have to admit, I liked the retooled message. Hillary still had no clear rationale for why she wanted to be president. But reminding voters that she wasn’t Trump seemed like a better reason than building ladders of opportunity.
But even as Hillary declared in Miami that “trying to divide America between us and them is wrong, and we’re not going to let it work,” back in Brooklyn, Robby et al. were feverishly slicing and dicing the nation’s demographics right down to zip codes and church attendance and TV-viewing habits. There were churchgoing black women who loved Hillary (“She was loyal to her husband and she’ll be loyal to us,” one woman at the Mt. Zion Fellowship church in Cleveland told me).
The so-called Southern firewall was working. Hillary ran up the score with black voters in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia and Latinos in Texas. Bernie won whites in Oklahoma, Vermont, Colorado, and Minnesota. Brooklyn started to worry black voters might feel exploited. After Super Tuesday, Brooklyn raced to install “a black campaign vice chair or Sr advisor” to “send the message that, Hillary puts her actions where her mouth is, and actually does appreciate the black vote.” Enter Minyon Moore, a powerhouse and Hillaryland alum. Like most of Hillary’s female friends (many of whom were women of color) Minyon was equal parts terrifying and a lot of fun.
I’d heard she defended me early on after The Guys portrayed me as a Lucifer in Lululemon. She said to Hillary, “Are you kidding me? She’s just a young woman trying to do her job.” Minyon set up her office on the tenth floor of the Brooklyn HQ near Podesta, Mook, Jen, and Policy Guy. But for many young black voters, the stench of exploitation remained, even months later when Obama said he’d consider it a “personal insult” if black voters didn’t support Hillary. “Absolutely hate this framing of the necessity of voting (for Democrats) that places all the blame on marginalized and young folks,” Vann R. Newkirk II, a writer for the Atlantic, tweeted.
Hillary was baffled when everyone said she’d been pandering to black voters when she told Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club that she carries hot sauce in her bag. She’s always traveled with hot peppers and hot sauce. And when she heard about the lyrics to Beyoncé’s “Formation” off of Lemonade, Hillary initially thought the singer put hot sauce in her lemonade. “Who was I pandering to? The hot sauce lobby?” she’d ask people.
Hillary had hardly left the stage at the Miami Ice Palace when Robby sent out a memo essentially predicting her defeat in Michigan. He noted that Bernie had spent $3 million on TV ads in the state and is “competing very aggressively in Michigan.” Robby and his delegate calculator didn’t see the point of investing much there—the math didn’t make sense. “Even if Sen. Sanders were able to eke out a victory there, we would still net more delegates in Mississippi, which holds its election on the same night.”
Who needs Michigan when you’ve got Mississippi?
I figured Robby was downplaying expectations. The campaign’s internal polling had Hillary at least five points ahead in Michigan. I was so certain she’d win that the night of the primary I decided to skip her rally in Cleveland. I wasn’t writing the main news story and getting there would’ve involved a four-hour drive from Detroit and an early-morning flight to Miami. But those were excuses. The truth was I wanted to see Bobby and sleep in my own bed. I could live-stream the speech.
But as results trickled in, my editors panicked. “You get any sense of the mood over there?” Carolyn emailed. I didn’t lie. But I also didn’t volunteer that I was on the Lower East Side. Mamma wouldn’t be happy if she knew I was at home watching Wolf Blitzer while slurping down tiny buns in my pajamas. “It’s not good,” I emailed. “She has got to kill this narrative that she is a ‘regional’ candidate who only wins in the South.”
Both of these statements were technically true: The mood in our living room that night was definitely not good, and Hillary had to prove she could win whites in the Midwest. Aside from worrying that I’d let Carolyn down, my main thought when CNN called the contest for her Esteemed Opponent was Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck, this motherfucking primary is never going to fucking end. I stomped around the apartment making calls to sources about why she lost and what it means. I booked my flight to Miami in the morning and threw my roller bag open on the bed and stuffed it with layers to get me through several climates, while reciting something like “Fucking, motherfucking Michigan. Fuck. Fuck.” By midnight, Bobby wished he were watching CNN’s magic map all by himself.
In her Cleveland speech, Hillary didn’t mention losing Michigan or winning Mississippi, but for the first time she showed the subtlest of public signs of what she’d been saying privately for months—her lifelong belief that we’re all in this together just didn’t fit with the off-with-their-heads election year. For eleven months, I’d heard Hillary say, “I want to be the president for the struggling, the striving, and the successful.” But that night she said, “I don’t want to be the president for those who are already successful—they don’t need me. I want to be the president for the struggling and the striving.”
Hillary was on a rampage. Several Brooklyn sources told me she’d been as exasperated by my Michigan postmortem and the Times’ coverage as she was by Bernie Sanders, and that was saying something. Hillary may have even preferred stories about her emails or her psychological state to stories about her evolving message (See “Spontaneity Is Embargoed Until 4:00 p.m.”). She thought I’d blown up a slight variation on her standard line into the front-page, above-the-fold story that said she’d been “stung by the bad showing” and “was already recalibrating her message, even altering her standard line before the Michigan race had been called.” I wrote that the state’s white voters had been “scarred by the free trade deals” like NAFTA that Bill Clinton signed into law.
I know this irked her, but honestly, I couldn’t believe Hillary still hadn’t figured out what to say about NAFTA. During the 2008 primary, she bashed her husband’s signature trade deal in Ohio. Then we’d fly to south Texas—where the economy was going gangbusters thanks partly to NAFTA—and she’d praise its impact. Obama summed it up in 2008: “The fact is, she was saying great things about NAFTA until she was running for president.” Now Bernie talked nonstop about her paid speeches to Wall Street (“I kind of think if you’re going to be paid $225,000 for a speech, it must be a fantastic speech, a brilliant speech which you would want to share with the American people”) and her support for “the disastrous trade agreements written by corporate America.”
The night after Michigan, at the next Democratic debate in Miami, Joel Benenson insisted Rust Belt voters didn’t give a shit about NAFTA. They’d crunched the data and said trade didn’t motivate the suburban women and minorities of the vaunted Hillary Coalition. “It’s just not an issue that we’re seeing,” he said. Jen Palmieri shook her head at me outside in the swampy south Florida air. “NAFTA, Amy, really?” The next morning, after the Travelers flew from Miami to Tampa only to miss most of Hillary’s speech, I complained via email, “We invest a lot of time and resources into traveling and expect, at the very, very least, to be at the events.”
Brown Loafers replied, “Yes, I wouldn’t want her message being mischaracterized.” And, “I’m sorry you guys are delayed. But I have sympathy for just about everyone on the road but you today.”
Thursday, 3/10
Miami, FL en route Tampa, FL
Tampa, FL en route Durham, NC
Durham, NC en route Vernon Hills, IL
RON–Chicago, IL
Friday, 3/11
Press should make their own way to St. Louis, MO to resume traveling with us the morning of Saturday (3/12).
Saturday, 3/12
Press will meet at first location in St. Louis, MO. Exact timing and location TBD but will be sent to you as soon as possible.
St. Louis, MO en route Cleveland, OH
RON–Cleveland, OH
To make matters worse, I couldn’t stop itching. I was convinced I’d picked up scabies at a La Quinta Inn at the Miami airport where a working girl in a tiny miniskirt had paid cash for her room before I approached the front desk to inquire about our corporate AmEx rate. I couldn’t sleep, certain there was something alive and burrowing under my skin. I couldn’t get out of the bubble to see a doctor until a couple of days later when the campaign got to Chicago and Hillary took a day off to attend Nancy Reagan’s funeral in Simi Valley, California. For two days, I tried to type with one hand so I could scratch with the other. My arms and legs were dry and dotted with puffy red marks.
“Not scabies,” the doctor said, as he scribbled on a prescription pad. He said the agonizing itch was an allergic reaction to cheap hotel detergent and gave me a prescription for an antihistamine and an ointment that made my suitcase smell like sulfur.
I wasn’t convinced. “Are you sure? I texted my friend Barry who got scabies from the towels at our boot camp and he said it looks like scabies.”
He was losing his patience. “Mites are parasites. They would’ve nested and bred between your fingers. There’s nothing there.”
“Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God. That seemed disgusting and awful, and I definitely wasn’t gonna have time to fumigate my clothes before Tuesday.”
I’d hardly jumped off the exam table when I looked at Twitter and saw Hillary had a momentary brain
fart. In an interview with Andrea Mitchell she praised Nancy Reagan’s “low-key advocacy” on HIV/AIDS. She said the first lady (who notoriously ignored HIV/AIDS even as thousands of gay men died) had “started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it.” I’m away from my laptop for ten minutes, and she had to piss off the gays.
Hillary so rarely misspoke that every gaffe, if left hanging there, could stretch out for months, years, hell, her whole career (see Cookies, Teas). But the pressure to be perfect started to take on a whole new meaning when it looked like she’d be running against Trump.
“He can say whatever the fuck he wants, but she’s exhausted and tried to think of something nice to say about a dead lady?” Jen asked me that night. Fair question. I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t.
(That night when Trump canceled his Chicago rally amid violent protests, I heard from Trump sources who said Brooklyn had staged the unrest to draw attention away from the Nancy Reagan AIDS gaffe. Again, giving the Clinton campaign way too much credit.)
The Gaffe Tour continued. Two days later, Hillary said during a CNN town hall in Columbus that her clean-energy plan would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” She’d already hemorrhaged white working-class voters to the point that no one remembered that those had been her people in 2008. And now this. Later that week, she shook hands on the rope line in Charlotte, North Carolina, and over the hum of “Fight Song,” a voice yelled out, “Secretary Clinton! Why did you say you were going to destroy coal jobs?” Trump loved contrasting Hillary’s comment with his own vague promise to put “our steelworkers and our miners” back to work. His campaign released a video of his mushrooming crowds of mostly white men waving trump digs coal signs.
