Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  On the third day, she apologized. Asked if Hillary would talk to the press, one of The Guys said, “No, it’s a self-immolation day.”

  Hillary later did what I called an Appalachian Apology Tour, a two-day bus tour through coal country during which an out-of-work coal worker, Bo Copley, confronted her as part of a roundtable discussion at a health center in “Bloody Mingo” County, West Virginia. “How could you say you are going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend?” Copley said.

  “I understand the anger and I understand the fear and I understand the disappointment that is being expressed. How could it not be given what’s going on here?” Hillary told Bo. “Because of the misstatement that I made, which I apologized for when I saw how it was being used, I know that my chances [in Appalachia] are pretty difficult, to be honest.”

  I sat on the floor feet away and studied Hillary. She didn’t win over Copley, a Republican who planned to vote Trump, but it had been one of her best moments. She’d shown empathy and that she had real plans to create “good paying clean-energy jobs.” Mostly though, Hillary had shown up.

  That same month, we were outside Tacoma, Washington. Tribal leaders bestowed on Hillary the Lushootseed Indian name meaning “Strong Woman” and wrapped a ceremonial Pendleton blanket over her emerald-green leather blazer, the one with the three-quarter sleeves and the fat buttons. The Travelers, the ten or so of us who stayed on to cover the Washington state caucuses, stood outside as a light mist fell on the Puyallup Indian reservation. Brown Loafers broke down the Hillary Gaffe Matrix.

  “Number One: You get something wrong.” [E.g., Hillary said, in 2008, that as first lady she’d arrived in Bosnia “under sniper fire.” In reality, she’d been surrounded by children, Sheryl Crow, and Sinbad, who told the Post the “scariest” part of the trip had been deciding where to eat.]

  “Number Two: You say something inartfully.” [E.g., also in 2008, Hillary defended her choice to remain in the primary even though Obama appeared to be the nominee by saying, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”]

  “Or, Number Three: You say something that you mean but you didn’t intend to say.” [E.g., months later, Hillary calling half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables” would fit nicely into category three.]

  The campaign argued Trump and the GOP had taken Hillary’s coal comments so wildly out of context that it didn’t even pass as a gaffe. “She was talking about creating clean-energy jobs! It was ridiculous,” Brown Loafers said.

  Florida . . . win. North Carolina . . . win. Ohio . . . win. Illinois . . . win. Missouri . . . win.

  It was Tuesday, March 15, and Hillary—even with her gaffes—had cleaned the fuck up. For her victory speech, she chose West Palm Beach, down the road from where Trump delivered his own victory speech at Mar-a-Lago. “This is another Super Tuesday!” she said. Hillary had this incongruous urge to rhyme whenever she wanted to drive home a serious point. In her stump speech, it was “No bank is too big to fail, and no executive is too powerful to jail,” and “Inversion? It’s more like a perversion.” Was the country ready for a president who sounded like Dr. Seuss? “When we hear a candidate for president call for rounding up twelve million immigrants, banning all Muslims from entering the United States, when he embraces torture, that doesn’t make him STRONG—it makes him WRONG,” Hillary said in her West Palm Beach victory speech. She called on every American to fight the GOP front-runner’s “bluster and bigotry.”

  In a campaign that had lacked electricity, that night in West Palm Beach was electric. Even Brooklyn thought she’d lose Ohio and Missouri—especially after the coal gaffe (or nongaffe gaffe depending on whom you asked). But she’d shown that scrappy underdog side Bill always talked about. On the Saturday night before St. Patrick’s Day, she made an impromptu stop at the O’Donold’s Irish Pub & Grill in desolate downtown Youngstown, a former steelworkers’ metropolis that now has one of the highest unemployment rates in Ohio. I watched her down half a St. Patrick’s Day pint of Guinness without taking a breath. “It’s the best Guinness I’ve ever had! A Youngstown Guinness!” she said, throwing down what was left of the pint onto the wooden bar. A man in a drink like a champion T-shirt leaned in for a selfie. “Born in the USA” blasted from a jukebox. “She knows where the Mahoning Valley is, that’s for sure!” a woman yelled. “Something about Hillary tossing back a cold one makes days of miserable, tedious travel all worthwhile,” Peter Nicholas said. I couldn’t have agreed more.

  In Miami, Hillary became a speedboat again. She shook hands with black and Latino hotel workers, a move I hadn’t seen her do since the Vegas casinos before the Nevada caucuses. I remembered that she did have a special connection to the working class—just not the white working class that everybody was talking about. A chubby-cheeked Afro-Cuban kitchen worker grasped one of Hillary’s hands between his own and held her there for a second. He told me in Spanish, “If the bridges were all destroyed, I would swim to vote for her.”

  Rubio couldn’t even beat Trump in his home state and dropped out. “America’s in the middle of a real political storm, a real tsunami. We should’ve seen this coming,” Little Marco said in Miami. Hillary’s aides, almost all of whom descended on West Palm Beach, were elated—Rubio, whom they believed to be Hillary’s toughest GOP rival, vanquished by a reality TV huckster. Hillary took a couple of days off in Chappaqua to regroup and let the reality of Trump sink in.

  Bernie had the online donations to continue to wreak some havoc, but he was a zombie. Losing Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri meant he’d lost his post-Michigan luster as the white working-class whisperer. The Bernie Bros didn’t want to accept this reality. They flooded my inbox with the literary flair of an unemployed liberal arts major whose prime interests were Holden Caulfield, the presidential campaign, and Internet porn.

  “Patrick Healy and Amy Chozick are too busy sucking and fucking each other to spend a moment considering what Sanders is actually proposing . . .” They provided helpful feedback on our story about the Latino vote: “You’re inept and biased and if you weren’t so busy licking each other’s assholes and dreaming of sucking Hillary’s ass (well, you already are metaphorically) you might actually have time for journalism with integrity.” The emails were usually signed the same way: “Go fuck yourself and I hope it hurts.”

  33

  “Let Donald Be Donald”

  New York City, the early aughts

  Bill Clinton was the best friend Donald Trump always hoped to have. When a sex scandal loomed over the White House, Trump defended the president, saying he was a “terrific guy.” His only criticism was of his choice. “It was Monica! I mean, terrible choice,” Trump told the Times.

  He’d urged the Clintons to move into one of his Trump-branded Manhattan condos when they left the White House. They opted for a five-bedroom colonial in Chappaqua instead. When a Waspy Westchester golf club hesitated to accept Clinton, Donald begged him to join the Trump National Golf Club, saying Clinton is “a great gentleman, a good golfer and a wonderful guy.” (Both men are, in reality, mediocre golfers and cheats known for taking mulligans. Even Terry McAuliffe has pretended to enjoy eighteen holes and then thrown his clubs into the trunk of his car and sworn off ever playing golf with Clinton again.)

  When Hillary won her Senate seat, Trump sent a congratulatory note (signed in black ink, and underlined twice, “Great Going!”). He extended invitation after invitation to host Bill and Hillary at Mar-a-Lago, but they preferred to vacation at Oscar de la Renta’s place in Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic.

  When I asked Trump about this unrequited friendship, he reverted to marketing mode. “I don’t recollect the Clintons ever staying at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, which may be the most successful private club in the United States. If they did want to stay there, or stayed there, it only shows that they have good taste.”

  Less than a year before
the campaign started, Bill and Trump golfed together at Trump National. Bill casually encouraged Trump to run, thinking his candidacy would roil the Republican field. For all his political foresight, Bill spent most of the primaries oblivious that this reality TV schmo could win the Republican nomination. He insisted that Rubio would pull through, even after his disastrous debate malfunction in New Hampshire. For one, Trump didn’t really do politics. He was a notorious germophobe. Trump once saw Bill speak at a post-9/11 ceremony in New York and praised the former president, saying, “He shook hands with everybody out there. And some of these people had filthy hands.”

  When Rubio dropped out, the reality set in. Bill saw genius in Trump’s economic populism and understood he was the perfect candidate for what Clinton called the “Instagram election”—an era when voters wanted only bite-size solutions. “Build a wall!” “Ban the Muslims!” “Make China pay!” Hillary didn’t do bite-size.

  “We live in a Snapchat-Twitter world,” Clinton later unleashed on a crowd in North Carolina. “It’s so much easier just to discredit people and call them names.”

  By late February, Bill went red in the face on almost daily conference calls trying to warn Brooklyn that Trump had a shrewd understanding of the angst that so many voters—his voters, the white working class whom Clinton brought back to the Democratic Party in 1992—were feeling.

  He’d wanted Hillary to speak at Notre Dame, as he and Obama and Biden had all done. But Robby told him white Catholics weren’t the demographic she needed to spend her time talking to.

  Robby always listened patiently, respectfully. But he mostly saw in the former president a relic, a brilliant tactician of a bygone era. Behind his back, Robby did a Bill impersonation (“And let me tell you another thing about the white working class . . .”) waving a finger in a Clintonian motion. Mook’s mafia would laugh. Any Democratic operative under forty knew that those white voters were never coming back. The Hillary Coalition was built on suburban women, minorities, and the young. Trump had insulted so many voting blocs (women, Muslims, Mexicans, the disabled, Diet Coke drinkers, etc.) and provided such a veritable feast of offenses that Hillary, her top aides, and the DNC didn’t think they needed to overthink the strategy.

  Brooklyn had organized a book of oppo research on Rubio, Cruz, and Trump. The tome on Trump was the shortest, 157 pages, and mostly focused on his bankruptcies, his products being made in China, and some lewd comments he’d made on The Apprentice. (“It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”) They thought Trump would do the heavy lifting for them. We thought so, too. I cowrote a story about how suburban and independent women “who will play an outsize role in deciding the fall election”* would be so turned off by Trump insulting Heidi Cruz’s looks that they’d run into Hillary’s arms. Trump hated our premise, tweeting in response, “The media is so after me on women. Wow, this is a tough business. Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!”

  When the Heidi Cruz insult fest stretched into day three, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chairwoman, told me, “I want Donald Trump to talk every single day for the rest of this election.” Hillary summed up the strategy—or lack thereof—in simpler terms: “Let Donald be Donald.”

  I hadn’t worked out of the New York office in months. The first thing I noticed when I got back from Miami were the balloons.

  In September, when I’d first put my “I’m driving long distances in Iowa . . .” out-of-office message on and prepared for life on the trail, the Times Magazine had dropped off a few extra balloons that they’d used in the photo shoot to illustrate a cover story about Trump by Mark Leibovich. The balloons were custom-made to look like Trump, with his sweep of mustardy hair across the top, a button mouth, and red power tie down the middle. They should’ve deflated months ago, but there was Trump’s bulbous Mylar face, still buoyant and hovering over the Times politics pod.

  34

  Stay Just a Little Bit Longer

  Madison, Wisconsin, March 2016

  Saturday, 3/19—HRC has no public events scheduled.

  Sunday, 3/20—HRC has no public events scheduled.

  It went on like that for days, with a couple campaign stops in Arizona and California mixed in. Hillary figured she’d focus on fundraising and ride out the remainder of the late March and early April primary contests. Washington, Wisconsin, Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming—the white voters in those states were Feeling the Bern anyway. She didn’t need them to win the nomination. Wisconsin, the only state with any real electoral value, hadn’t voted for a Republican since 1984 when Ronald Reagan swept forty-nine states. The state’s conservative talk-show host, Charlie Sykes, called Trump a “whiny, thin-skinned bully.”

  Monday, 3/28—HRC will attend a fundraising event in Chicago, IL and then will deliver remarks on the Supreme Court in Madison, WI and hold an organizing event in Milwaukee, WI.

  Tuesday, 3/29—HRC will be campaigning in Milwaukee, La Crosse, and Green Bay, WI.

  In keeping with her let-Donald-be-Donald mantra, Hillary decided to talk to the Travelers. On a stop at the Pearl Street Brewery, a chic industrial space in La Crosse, Wisconsin, with silver kegs, exposed pipes, and a foosball table, Hillary expressed her solidarity with the Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields who brought a battery charge against Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

  “I think that the reporter who brought the charge deserves a lot of credit for following through on the way she was physically handled at an event, and I think the charges being brought today certainly suggest that the authorities thought that her story was credible,” Hillary said. Asked if she’d fire her own campaign manager if he’d done something like that—a scenario that seemed unlikely given Robby’s admirable self-restraint—Hillary demurred, “I’m not going to comment on this particular case.”

  But she said that Trump’s “negative and really mean-spirited language and actions” were to blame. “He is like a political arsonist, he has set some fires and then people have acted in ways that I think are deplorable.” De-plor-able, adjective, deserving strong condemnation; completely unacceptable; shockingly bad in quality, the New Oxford American Dictionary.

  Then Hillary held a pint under the tap and poured herself a Downtown Nut Brown ale. “I bet these reporters would like it!” she said and took a long swig. “Cheers! It’s good.”

  The travel schedule was so blissfully light that I’d flown into Madison the previous morning and had time to squeeze in a spin class just off the University of Wisconsin campus before covering Hillary’s speech about the Supreme Court opening left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. She said that in Trump, Republicans got the hate-spewing candidate they deserved. “When you have a party dead set on demonizing the president, you may just end up with a candidate who says the president never legally was the president at all.”

  After that, Hillary went shopping. At a stop at the Anthology boutique, she browsed through beaded necklaces, magnets with vintage maps of Wisconsin, and other assorted tchotchkes. “Hello everybody, how are you?” she said to the Travelers as we squatted in the back of the kitsch-filled store. “We’re determined to do some shopping. We’ve had a retail drought. I’m kind of looking, truly.”

  She settled on a red beaded necklace and a button that read keep calm and vote hillary. She called out to Brown Loafers for some cash. As she headed for the door, Hillary looked back at the ten or so of us and said, “I love being in Wisconsin! I look forward to being here, meeting with people. We’re just going to work hard.”

  Wednesday, 3/30—HRC will be campaigning and attending fundraising events in New York City.

  Thursday, 3/31—HRC will be likely campaigning in New York and attending fundraising events in Massachusetts.

  Friday, 4/1—HRC will be attending a fundraising event in New Jersey.

  Saturday, 4/2—HRC has no events scheduled at this time.

  Sunday, 4/3—HRC has no events scheduled at this time.

  That was Hillary’
s last trip to Wisconsin.

  35

  The Kids Are Alright

  New York City, April 2016

  To say I didn’t anticipate that Bernie Sanders would continue to be a pain in Hillary’s ass until the very last contest in June, or that he’d ignite a burgeoning insurgency and roil the Democratic Party for years to come, would be putting it mildly. I initially brushed Bernie off with such casual nonchalance, such ill-informed, elite-media snobbery that I almost canceled our first one-on-one coffee because I didn’t want to miss abs-and-back day at boot camp. It was April 2015 and Bernie’s communications director, Michael Briggs, had reached out to see if I wanted to sit down with the Vermont senator at a Starbucks near Times Square. I’d said yes before I got word that Hillary would announce her candidacy in the next couple of days. Terrified that I would put on the campaign-trail twenty again and knowing that my mornings would soon turn into sciatica-and-gut days at a Holiday Inn Express somewhere, I wished I hadn’t said yes. I dragged myself to the Starbucks inside the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue with the same mix of guilt and obligation as when my mom made me visit her emphysemic aunt Shirley. Shirley smoked her whole life and spent her golden years in a housedress hooked up to oxygen in a garden home at the Golden Manor Jewish Home for the Aged. We didn’t have to bring a kugel to Bernie, but I did have to nod politely as he went through his talking points. I wrote in my notebook, “99 percent . . . new income in US . . . goes to top 1 percent . . . corrupt system . . . ‘political revolution’ . . .” I put that term, political revolution, in bitchy blue-ink quotes. I inched my chair away from the scent of black coffee and Quaker Oats that blew my way each time Bernie said “the proliferation of millionaires and billionaires,” with the stiff-lipped B and the long, breathy ayy-ehrs that would come to narrate the Democratic primary.